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ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE 



R. E. LEE CAMR C. Y. 



AT 



RICHMOND, VA., DECEMBER 18th, 1908, 



IN THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE PORTRAIT OF 



GENERAL WILLIAM H. PAYNE, 



LEIGH ROBINSON. 



RICHMOND: 

WM. ELLIS JONES, BOOK AND JOB PRINTER. 
1909. 






^' 



17 s:'a9 



1 ADDRESS, 



Mr. Commander and Fellow-Soldiers: 

The Lee Camp of Confederate Veterans stands for a grand 
ideal. In the throng of selfish contention, it is your prerogative to 
exist, as a shrine amid ruins, that you may preserve as in amber 
the memory of that bright sword which, among the swords of the 
captains, shines like yonder sentry of the skies, around whose serene 
light the stars obediently bend. In an anarchical night time of 
transition this unswerving force burns in our heavens, like a word 
of command, whose authority we reverence, and whose speech is the 
"still small voice" of duty. As the commemoration thereof, this 
shrine shall be a guide post in the desert. 

Unselfish force is a Scripture "given by inspiration of God." 
Our world divides itself into the heroes who live and die for others, 
and the others for whom they live and die. The hero is the response 
to that question of the early Satan, "Doth Job serve (or fear) God 
for naught?" The lofty answer is, he doth. His own heroism is 
the hero's booty. He gives his greatness to others for the joy and 
glory of giving. Save in a mere material sense, it is not for naught. 
The life, which, while strong in the strife forgets itself in the striv- 
ing, is born Commander of the Faithful, and in every age has found 
the faithful to command. We look elsewhere, indeed, for the thrifty 
patriots who make the litany of the daughters of the horse leech the 
mother tongue and classic of their Pantheon. We turn to Robert 
Lee and say : There is one, who, in place of taking from others every 
present they might offer, grandly gave all he had of mind, body and 
estate to others, and for others. There is one who trod the path of 
self-denying greatness. There is one who scaled the last heights; 
in whose majestic passion defeat is transfigured into victory. There 
behold that power and passion of self-realization through self- 
renunciation, which is a perennial appeal by and to a divine essence, 
perhaps latent in the lowest, but forever patent in the highest. 
With what a serene unconsciousness the destiny laid upon him was 



met and mastered. It is not in human misfortune, nor in huraan 
power to efface the eminence in which he abides, nor to efface us 
if we are not unworthy of it. Long as there is reverence for honor; 
long as there sliall linger an honor to revere, the earnest, the fear- 
less, the true will bow down to him, who having the option of all 
that this world has to give, thought of duty first ; of self last. Suc- 
cess does not constitute his glory. His glory is enhanced, ethereal- 
ized, more gloriously reveaJed by what the world calls his defeat. 
Sordid success is as dust in the balance by the side of it. Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams has called Lee "the quintessence of Vir- 
ginia.'' As the figure in the forefront of the battle; as the pro- 
tagonist of the Southern storm; as the embodied righteousness of 
the cause whereof he was captain, he requires and requites our wor- 
ship. Viewing him as the concentration of our own soul ; as em- 
bodying the high duty, the sacred conscience, the martyred valor, 
which bore aloft his standard, his fame is the proudest possession 
ever vouchsafed to any people of any country, in any age. We had 
not known the full stature of Lee, had it not been for what the 
world calls his defeat, (ilreat as were his victories over enemies, the 
great conquest of this kingly man was his conquest of himself. 
Each passing year, more and moi-e, endears him to us. He is more 
than ever dear to us, for that he was the matchless hero of adversity 
and example for our own; for that he added to all other victory — 
victory over defeat — nay, over outlawry by them to whom his path 
was a rebuke. The more he is lifted up by outlaw sentence, the 
more he draws us to him. 

Our hero is victor over victory. Not the champion of the strong 
against the weak, but of the weak against the strong is the Bayard 
of the heart. Greatness, which having need to say in the battle, 
"All things are against me" ; yet battles with consummate courage 
to the end, is by that sign shown to be great. It is not super- 
eminent for one to win when all things are for him. Of all the 
great things Lee did for his State, and for the South, the greatest 
was the life he gave; a life the world is unable to measure by re- 
ward; save that the world reserves for the highest — a crown of 
thorns. On his outlawed height, he fought, there still fights 
the battle for us. His calm grandeur — calm in the midst of raging 
elements — because of victory over them, was and is our warrior. 



We fight behind the fortress of an unsullied life, while we have him 
for captain. We build his truest monument less by contribution 
from our purses than by humble imitations in our lives, though at 
long interval and with tender steps. As the likeness of his mind is 
stamped upon them who claim to follow him will be his monument. 
The soul that rises superior to the storms of fate, it shall live. 

Bound up with Lee is that warrior of the Living God— led by the 
Spirit if man ever was— who, facing the sharpest and steepest, 
brought all the mountains of difficulty to their knees before him; 
who, patient to plan, infallible to achieve, with one hand grasped 
courageously that of his fellow man, because he had laid the other 
humbly in that of God. Bound up with Lee is that right arm of 
victory, known once and forever as Stonewall Jackson. We learn of 
him that the genius which wins victory all along the line, under 
conditions which to the common eye make victory impossible, is the 
moral and the fruit of faith. In him we read the old eternal mys- 
tery of puissance by persistence. The stability of soul beneath that 
inflexible face words translate not. No stage lightning, no theatric 
thunder, played part in his equipment. We who once looked upon 
his face, so earnestly silent, felt the silence to be a measure of the 
depth; as if the storm of life had ended in the silence of victory 
over it. By a power which cannot be put in words we felt the spell 
of his mysterious might fall upon his followers, and melt the sinews 
of their strength into his own terrible right arm. 

Meditation upon Stonewall Jackson inclines one to believe that 
grand, genuine strenuousness is most apt to abound where there is 
least said about it. Bound up with Lee I have said. To this twin 
thunderbolt we give the reverence for true greatness which deepens 
with every true approach to it and insight into it. In death they 
give defiance unto death; vanquish death. In death they are lifted 
up to be the living word of our ideal. They are the Bruce and 
Wallace of the South. Could we rally a united South to follow in 
peace, with war's obedience, the banner of their characters, it were 
a moral Bannockburn. 

This camp of veterans has deemed it a grateful and a graceful 
duty to group around the portrait of their chief, in death, as in life, 
the lieutenants of his fortitude. You felt you would not do your 
duty to the hero of duty if you left this undone. Here, then, we 



may mark and inwardly digest, the biography of the brave; here 
breathe in the moral fascination of heroic minds. Every man who 
is the hero of a brave, true life is a revelation to others. In the de- 
gree that we bow down to such life is the enlargement of our own. 

It is to-night my privilege, at once proud and sad, to be your 
medium to accept, as worthy to be included in this goodly fellow- 
ship of fame, the portrait of one who was ever foremost in life's 
battle charge. The image of William H. Payne is etched on our 
hearts, as by the defining needle on a plate, "wax to receive and 
marble to retain"; or, to slightly change the figure, the mention of 
his name evokes the clear-cut cameo of one whose courage knew no 
danger, or knew it only to despise it ; with wliom to be heroic was 
involuntary. A bearing manly and refined, adorned by a gentle 
courtesv, was the visible sign of knightly grace and knightly valor 
at all times and in all ])laces, unafraid, unaffected, unequivocal. 
At Virginia's school of war he had applied himself with natural 
relish to the profession of arms. In this camp of preparation he 
formed a lasting freindship with that fine type of a brave and gentle 
South, Thomas Henry Carter. Each was destined,, by deeds, 
not words, to write a living chapter in the world old epic of "arms 
and the man.*' Later they met at Virginia's University, whither 
Payne went to study the virtue and the truth of law and Carter the 
ministries of healing. After the lapse of a decade, in the shock of 
arms which shook a continent, again they came together to win a 
parallel renown ; Payne at the head of horse : Carter in the blaze of 
his fierce and stubborn guns. Touching are the words the former 
wrote in 1882 to Mr. Isaac Winston: "I rejoice that I lived in the 
heroic age of the South, and that my early life was spent in games 
of chivalry, romance, and, McGregor-like love for my own heath, 
1 can say from my heart I loved Virginia — 

" Beyond her map, my heart travels not, 
But fills that limit to the utmost verge." 

So he grew to manhood in the days of approaching doom, when 
the old mother State was like the quiet lake above which the hawk 
is circling. It was when the clouds began to lower over her house 
that, in full view of the battle she would inherit, William H. Payne 
gave her "his promise true." 



At the head of the Black Horse Troop, a band of brothers which 
came "not to woo honor, but to wed it," this man, with the Mc- 
Gregor-like love for his own heath, rode into his fearless fight for it. 
They rode together to fight, to bleed ; if need be, to die for a Com- 
monwealth in its own limits happy and strong; outside its own 
limits incurring in some parts the envious hate felt for them who 
have that whereof the envious feel the force and feel that lack. He, 
their captain, quickly proved he was by training and tradition all 
that we picture as the beau sabreur. As the captain rose to the 
brigadier, the meaning of his life flamed out for all to see. As he 
rode with Stuart, Hampton, and the Lees, as he rode deeper and 
deeper into the war, that meaning fell like a shaft of light across a 
darker and darker sky. War was the steel which struck the spark. 
He had been in boyhood the neighbor and the friend of Ashby, and 
was of a kindred spirit with that knight and paladin of Virginia and 
the valley of Virginia. They read the same books, they dreamed 
the same dreams. Nor was either content to be a dreamer. Each 
sought to make the dream reality. For them chivalry was not a 
mere poetic parable, but the glowing reality of life. For them the 
book of chivalry was not chained to the altar; but where the book 
was there rose an altar ; and the book was the struggle of man. To 
each this was an infallible book of duty pointing to what for each 
was very nearly the whole duty of man. To be taught to struggle 
with obstacles, to cope with the difficult, is far the best part of edu- 
cation. Faith to struggle is what is meant by character — the highest 
being that of moral struggle with material obstruction. At the 
head of a charge, whether of the Black Horse Troop or of his 
brigade in Fitz Lee's division, Payne was in the place carved out for 
him by nature. A trooper's sabre was his faith, his hope and — for 
the foe of all he loved — his charity. As Scott said, after severing 
connection with Vera Cruz, Payne might have said of his own 
spirit, "The scabbard was thrown away and we advanced with the 
naked blade." A lineal descendant of that old Bcrserkir daring, 
which by preference went to sea in a storm, his was the grace 
which made daring beautiful. He had the Joy of danger. We know 
by all the laws and inferences of knowledge that the bugle call to 
arms was to him as the cry of hounds to the hunter, or the roll of the 
reel to one who wanders by the trout stream. The gleam of his 



8 

sabre was as the flash of a knightly eye. He knew by instinct how 
to excite and sustain enthusiasm. He was as alert in his disciplined 
precautions as he was intrepid in facing odds. He was an enthusiast 
in war, in letters, and politics. Whatever he did, he did it with all 
his might. Briefly, let me illustrate the traits of one for whom 
numbers had no terrors; who despised numbers and defied defeat. 
They are traits which illustrate the dash and daring most essential 
to the cavalry officer. 

On September 3, 1864, he took command of his cavalry brigade 
(consisting of the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Virginia Eegiments) in 
Fitz Lee's division, then operating with General Early, in the Valley 
of Virginia. It was his brigade, with him at the head of it, which 
guarded the left flank of Early's army in the battle of Winchester 
and repulsed the Union cavalry in the Luray valley. His brigade, 
with him at the head of it, led the advance of Gordon's division, in 
the attack upon Sheridan at Cedar Creek. Crossing the north fork 
of the Shenandoah, below Cedar Creek, by a swift dash with picked 
men, he fell upon and captured the enemy's pickets and outposts 
without firing a shot. The enemy's camp was taken so completely 
by surprise that two divisions of Sheridan's corps, their camp, with 
all its equipment, wagons, horses, guns, fell an easy prey to Gordon's 
foot cavalry, which followed. Gordon, in his published reminis- 
cences, gives this account: "General Payne, of Virginia, one of the 
ablest and most knightly soldiers in the Confederate army, plunged 
with his intrepid cavalry into the river, and firing as they went upon 
Sheridan's mounted pickets and supporting squadrons, the Vir- 
ginians dashed in pursuit, as if in steeple chase with the Union 
riders, the coveted goal of both being the rear of Sheridan's army. 
The Federals sought for safety. Payne was seeking to spread con- 
fusion and panic in the Federal ranks and camps, and magnificently 
did he accomplish his purpose." 

At New Creek, a station on the Baltimore and Ohio Eailroad, in 
Hampshire county, in November, 1864. as Eosser, then in command 
of the division, approached the town, Payne requested that his 
brigade might lead in the assault. Colonel Cook, of the Eighth, who 
well knew the place, did not think it could be taken by assault. In 
the absence of surprise, this, no doubt, was the case. Eosser, how- 
ever, gave to Payne the control of the advance and attack. The 



latter so moved the first squadron, that the pickets and reserves of 
the enem}^ were captured without firing a shot. He then moved 
down the road at a walk, until he reached the foot of the hill on 
which a fort had been constructed. No fire came from the fort 
because the advance was thouglit to be their own cavalry returning 
from a raid ; as it had been conjectured would be supposed. Payne, 
then, ordering a charge, rode upon the gunners, in the act of driving 
the first shot into their guns. In less than half an hour the fort, 
town, and 828 prisoners had been captured. In Payne's last battle 
at Five Forks, in command of what had been Fitz Lee's division, he 
held in check and repelled a large force of Sheridan's cavalry. A 
severe wound, received by him in the fight, spared him the deeper 
wound of surrender at Appomattox. While lying helpless, at his 
home in Warrenton, he was again captured and again imprisoned. 

The spirit of battle which stirred in him was kind as it was brave. 
It was the spirit of one born to command. The ties cemented in 
war's peril were for him a sacred chain of obligation. Of all the 
troops he led; of all the stafi: who bore his orders; of all under him, 
or over him, in that fiery horse, I have yet to meet the man v/ho 
was not proudly conscious of that chain and proudly captive to it. 
His chief of stafi" writes of him : "A more gallant soldier, inspiring 
leader, or resourceful commander never drew sword in any cause." 
Wounded and left on the field at Williamsburg; wounded and cap- 
tured at Hanover near Gettysburg; wounded again at Five Forks 
and captured afterwards, as we have seen, Payne's life was spared 
for the moral battle to which a prostrate South was summoned. 

The definition, "War is Hell," was given by a prominent ))ar- 
ticipant in the war between the States. In the Savannahs of Geor- 
gia; the homes of the Carolinas; the valleys of Virginia, deeds were 
done which merit the definition. In those sweet valleys, over which, 
by orders from headquarters, the crow in flying should carry his own 
rations, the word was not a misnomer. A warrior's renown consists 
no longer in the greater host of armed men his valor hurls to defeat, 
but in the greater host of sorrows he fearlessly hurls on the un- 
armed. Time was when the warfare of the hero Saint was known 
as "Imitation of Christ." Our higher altruism knows it as "Imita- 
tion of Hell." Sherman, defending the conduct of his troops in 
Soutli Carolina, said to Carl Schurz: "Before we got out of that 



10 

state the men had so accustomed themselves to destroying every- 
thing along the line of march that sometimes when I had my head- 
quarters in a house that house began to burn before I was fairly out 
of it. * * * It always has been so, and always will be so." It 
has not been always so. On entering Pennsylvania General Lee 
proclaimed: "It will be remembered that we make war only on 
armed men." General Scott did the same in Mexico. Mexican 
ranches found their best market in his camp. Beyond the Christian 
pale we may find example. The successor of Mahomet, in dis- 
patching his army into Syria, instructed as follows: "When you 
meet with your enemies quit yourselves like men, and don't turn 
your backs, and if you get the victory, kill no little children nor old 
people, nor women; destroy no palm trees, nor burn any fields of 
corn; cut down no fruit trees, do not any mischief to cattle, only 
such as you kill to eat." Wlien last summer the war in Morocco 
had subsided, it was reported; they, the people of Morocco, "have 
had a chance to see how a civilized nation fights. It has amazed 
them to discover that French soldiers respect womanhood and re- 
frain from looting." Nevetheless, it may be admitted, that the war 
waged by philanthropy against the South was correctly described as 
"hell" by one of the philanthropists. 

There remained the lesson, "Peace is Hell." To overthrow the 
armies of a people is not so fatal as to degrade the ideals of a people. 
To crush the body is cruel, but not so cruel as to deprave the soul. 
In the ideals they really pursue is the measure of the real faitlis and 
reasonable hopes of Nations, States, Social and Federal Unions. Our 
motive force is in the ideals which are really our own. Is the pub- 
lished ideal a reality, or only a blasphemous appearance? A^ery 
nearly the last word of the Confederate Congress had this sob of 
despair: "Failure will cause us to drink the dregs of the cup of 
humiliation, even to the bitter dregs of having the history of our 
struggle written by New England historians." Because this proph- 
ecy is so far toward fulfilment, I am so unmerciful to-night. In 
1861 a strife of swords was invoked to establish a new ideal. "They 
chose new gods," cried Deborah : "then was there war in the gates." 
I crave your merciful patience with the narrative of what it was 
which was displaced and wherewithal it was replaced by Recon- 
struction. 



11 

Old as Aristotle and older, is the distinction of governments into 
bad or good according as they exist for the sake of the governors or 
the governed ; according as they are held as a spoil for the governors, 
or as a trust for the governed. The binding force of States, 
which create, for their own and for succeeding ages, vfhat we 
call grandeur, is the force of noblesse oblige. The truly strong 
give to the weakness of others a sympathy, born of victory over 
their own. The rock on which society is built is that of a 
nobleness conscious of the obligation to be noble. This is the 
origin as it is also the ideal of that ever miraculous force we call 
society. "It was by Rome's self abnegation," wrote Mr. Bryce, "that 
she romanized the world." Not by material but by moral force, man 
is made paulo minus ab angelis. What might be called the govern- 
ment of Noblesse Dispense achieves dispensation from all this. 
Where the former principle bears sway, we have the great States 
which are lamps to distant ages. Where the opposite is absolute, 
although the monarch be called, as in ancient Persia, the great king, 
his realm in the tale of time is small. We read the record of a 
selfishness, which, in the midst of palatial graft shrivels the soul. 
Selfishness is contraction. Sacrifice is expansion. The human 
secret is this of Noblesse Oblige. Obligation measures elevation. 
Intuitively, we impute this correlation to the Almighty Height. The 
foundation of man's metropolis are two — reverence and sympathy — 
the second made in the likeness of the first. Consciousness of this 
caused the men of old to speak of law, as a covenant with God ; of 
the State as Divine. 

Freedom is the free dominion of the law; and the law might be 
defined as the condition a creator imposes on his creature, which, 
like the condition a mathematician imposes on a curve, must be 
satisfied for the creature to properly exist. As we satisfy the con- 
ditions of freedom are we free? Does the freedom of which you 
talk mean freedom for duty or freedom from it? The power to be 
free is not a quite universal faculty, but the prize of a battle re- 
newed every morning by them who sleep on their arms every evening. 
Tlie issue to be tried is — which is stronger love of justice to others 
or rapacity for self? The true "irrepressible conflict" is the con- 
flict between freedom and corruption ; between Noblesse Oblige and 
Noblesse Dispense. What is called the birthright of freedom is the 
heritage of past heroisms and sacrifices. The sum total of all the 
conquests which have been made of man's inherent selfishness is 



12 

that on which his hope is stayed. As this conquest is, civilization, 
the refined sense of justice, is. 

It seems now a rainbow of romance, but there was once adminis- 
tered a justice which, like human life at common law, was so far 
beyond price as to admit of none. For some seventy-five years of 
her independence, and far back of that in her history, the adminis- 
trative and judicial functions of every county in Virginia were ad- 
ministered by magistrates who, without compensation to themselves, 
rendered judgment between litigants who incurred no costs. Wash- 
ington had been one of these magistrates, and before him Fairfax, 
Baron of Cameron. Jefferson was one. William B. Giles and John 
Taylor, of Caroline, were added to the list after each had left the 
Senate of the United States, and Monroe after he left the White 
House. "There is no part of the country," said John Marshall in 
1830, "where less of disquiet and less of ill-feeling between man 
and man is to be found than in this Commonwealth, and I believe 
most firmly that this state of things is mainly to be ascribed to the 
practical operation of our county courts. The magistrates who com- 
pose those courts consist in general of the best men in their respective 
counties." Here was that "unbought grace of life" which Burke calls 
the "cheap defense of nations." It comes back to us like a picture 
of some far ofp, fabled, golden age. It is the story of a society, 
simply and soundly true ; not a new affirmation, but a reaffirmation 
of those peaks of the past, which are freedom's Sinai. The ideal of 
that old day stood in direct relation to daily life. It was not a pro- 
fession. It was a vocation. Men had faith in each other and were 
justified in having it. Love for Commonwealth and willingness to 
die for it made a moral unit of their minds. A whole world were 
the unfair exchange for that clean and wholesome soul. Will you 
compare it with "prosperity" which, ])ointing to "rake off," "lionest 
graft," and the like, says these are my jewels? There were free 
men once who held it prosperous to be just. A country which is 
loved for the honor, the noble sympathy, that is in it — ah! how 
much better than the country, which is loved for the corruption 
which is in it ! After all, may not magnitude be a poor swap for 
magnanimity? It is the virtue, not the bigness, of a State which is 
greatness. To govern lionestly is more tlian to misgovern widely. 

The convention of 1829-30, in which Marshall's words were 
spoken, was the arena of contest between sections having, as they 
deemed, antagonistic interests ; the West having the numbers, the 



13 

East the property ; a struggle of the West to acquire, of the East 
to retain, power; a geograpliical difference in which East and West 
stood to each other somewhat, as in another war of sections, the 
South stood to the North. 

In that passionate debate, it was asked, in respect of all the men 
who had ever voted in the Commonwealth: "Has one of them ever 
been bribed for his vote? Has any gentleman ever heard of a 
single instance?" It was a memorable challenge. From the ocean 
to the Ohio no man could point to a single instance, nor to one 
abuse of the taxing power. And why? Because, as stated by one 
of the leaders of the West, they, who were invested with the power 
to tax, "were governed by the principles of justice and the feelings 
of honor." There was another reason. They who laid the taxes, 
paid tlie taxes. They who bore rule, bore the burden of rule. 

The social structure extolled by ^Marshall was a freedom wliich 
bound citizen to citizen by stronger ties than those of force. It was 
the ascendency of high over low ambition. It brought justice to 
every man's door; a justice which held the weak by their right; the 
strong by their duty. Patriots did not then take office as a means 
of support, but, on the contrary, impaired their means of support in 
taking office. Eminence and beneficence were correlative. When the 
service of Commonwealth at the expense of self is exchanged for the 
service of self at the expense of Commonwealth, it is self, not Com- 
monwealth, which is loved and served. Like Jefferson, the sons of 
Virginia might bankrupt themselves in the service of their country, 
but they did not recoup from the chest confided to their eustody. 
Uncompromising honesty in public life was their riches. They 
were trustees receiving from a cherished Commonwealth powers of 
which strict account was given. 'J'hey became great by sharing 
burdens which weighed others down, whereby others shared the 
dignity which lifts greatness up. They offered the calm depths of 
lives which bowed seven times a day to the sacred city of social com- 
pact. The arm of a connnon mother in loving kindness was around 
her children. These are the forces wliicli accumulate the moral 
capital of a community. When eminence means sacrifice; when 
it means gift of yourself, not gift to yourself, all do not speak at 
once. It comes l)ack to us like a l)reath from some higher sphere, 
recalling the truth, sure as anything reached by mathematical e.\- 
actness, that it is this ol)ligation of the greatest to the least which is 
the root of ail i^ood ; rather than the old animal rule of the extinc- 



14 

tion of the weaker by the stronger — the h)ve of self — which is the 
root of all evil. There is a difference between the old-fashioned 
respect which character comman^ahd the servility which money 
and appointing power buy. 

The great things of this world have not been done for the money 
that is in them. They have been done for the greatness that is in 
tliem. The grandeur of tliis worhi, that on which it turns as on a 
}jivot, has been the work of intense natures seeking as a paramount 
prize the accomplishment of their work. A sense of responsibility 
in the gifted for the inadequate; compassion for the friendless; 
sympathy for the wronged, is the tine expression through human 
agents of the justice and love of the Creator. It is the purest and 
most undefiled religion. 

The high men of that old day gave to a Commonwealth char- 
acters which touclied with their own beauty the very humblest who 
stood near them and looked up to them. They were made in the 
image of their State; or, shall we say, their State was the mirror 
which threw back their image. We see in them a certain repose in 
greatness, and not the restless impatience of them who are forever 
agonizing to persuade themselves and others that they are great. 
It was a Commonwealth whose binding link was sympathy; great, 
because of heartfelt sympathy with greatness. The trouble with this 
civilization was not that it was too low, but that it was too high; 
not that it was beneath them who railed against it, but that it was 
above. Because she was true to her own tradition, Virginia de- 
served to be called by James Kussell Lowell, "Mother of States and 
unpolluted men." Those "unpolluted men" had the self-respect 
which springs from respect for others, and is rewarded by respect of 
others. So grew Virginia, as grows a high-born tree ; spreading by 
slow degrees in the vital air of sympathy — a sympathy, wide and 
warm as her own tender sky. 

At the first flight of the Eagle of Union, John Kandolph of 
Pioanoke, saw what he called the "poison under the wings." Through 
his life he fought with the gift divine of genius to expel it. Few 
there were who could withstand the power of that piercing eye. 
He knew how to in\])ale the avowed high motive for the action that 
was mean; how, with a lash of flame, to strip selfishness of all dis- 
guises ; and they who writhed under his wrath abhorred the terrible 
truth of his veracious scorn. The simulation of the ethics of love 
by the ethics of lust has been the arch mock to procure each re- 



15 

curring downfall of fair hope. This simulation it was the mission 
of his fearless wisdom to lay bare with a consuming fury. The 
sophisters could not entice him. He was peculiar, they said — too 
peculiar to be practical. From of old God's people have been a 
"peculiar people." Doubtless, it is true, that in the modern sense 
no man could have said to him, "We are practical men." He had 
looked deep into realities. For this reason his speech pierced 
through and through appearances. To face the cohorts of the 
cupidities and to tell them to their teeth that their evil is not good 
is a role which appeals but feebly to the opportunist. Tlie fearless 
speaker of the truth; the fearless scourger of the false, is not the 
popular idol. His message is the great message of all freedom, the 
restraint of selfish power, the conquest of selfish passion, the con- 
quest of self. The freeman is he who recognizes the obligation of 
restraints, to break through which is anarchy. 

Like this son of her ardent soul, Virginia shrank not from "the 
cause of liberty in the capitol." Her battle was to replace "the 
divine right of kings" by the divine right of justice ; to defend the 
simplicity of truth against the idols of the time. She stood for 
that moral order which men may violate, but at their peril and to 
their ruin. Can brute force, the law of the jungle, be supplanted 
by the moral law of justice, is the problem freedom undertakes to 
satisfy. It is a struggle for the deep things of freedom; for the 
divine reality of a State, for living relations to eternal freedom. 
Against the ever-recurring selfishness of States, slipping like a 
snake from skin to skin, Virginia set her face like a flint. She 
gave her challenge to that gross materialism which is the hereditary 
foe of man. Specious devices to make the welfare of all pay special 
tribute to the pockets of the few faced at every turn her "stern 
round tower" of State's rights. Until overthrown by force in 1865, 
you will search the statutes in vain for traces of her selfishness. 
Everywhere she denied herself with a now forgotten grace. 

On the threshold of independence, her own Bill of Rights had 
set forth the inherent rights of freemen. First and foremost was 
their right to that government which "is most effectually secured 
against the danger of mal-administration" ; and the correlative of 
this, that the magistrates who exercise power are but trustees. As 
privilege proceeds liberty^ recedes, was the doctrine of those "strict 
constructionists." The cheerful giver of the money of others did not 
strike those "Virginia abstractionists" (derisively so-called), as a 



16 

superlative phenomenon. Tlie "protection" they demanded was pro- 
tection from power — the protection of which patriotism is the reci])- 
rocal; security against a less abstracted class of "abstractionists," 
bent upon abstraetino; the property of others. At the instance of the 
"corrupt squadron" (the idiom borrowed from tiie lexicon of Jeffer- 
son) to despoil the force (the common sacrifice for the com- 
mon weal) confided by the whole and for the whole, the trust 
fund of the commons, was, in their eyes, to lay unhallowed 
hands on the ark of the covenant. It was the fateful way to bring 
to the front what Mr. Dooley calls "those brave men elected by the 
taxpayer of America to defend the hearths of the tax dodger of 
America." 

By the searchlight which the present throws back upon the past, 
he who wills to look may see, that they were not narrow, but wide 
visioned and far-sighted who foresaw what is to-day the paradoxical 
combine of liberty and mammon ; who saw in this the likeness of 
another paradoxical joinder, spoken of as that of God and Mam- 
mon ; and, in the partisans of paradox, another kind of strict con- 
struction; the strict construction of God and latitudinous construc- 
tion of Mammon. It was the part of statesmanship to strike at the 
root of that which is to-day so resoundingly denounced a.s "preda- 
tory wealth"; to strike at the source of malefaction rather than 
while leaving that in full force and effect, to blast with spiritual 
thunder the lineal malefactors; to strike fearlessly the cause, rather 
than seek to condone it by rhapsodies of Billingsgate — vociferous 
and vain-hurled upon the inevitable consequence. Generosity with 
trust funds is parent of a multitude of evils; among the evils — 
Havemeyer being judge-parent of the predatory trusts, it is just now 
courtly to condemn. 

True, by others the Mother State was taunted with retrogression. 
True, the State which gave to the Union not only tlie Northwest 
Territory, but the pastures of Kentucky, was reduced thereby in 
territory and in wealth. The rewards of sacrifice and cupidity are 
not the same. When sacrifice grows lucrative it ceases to be sacri- 
fice. Virginia stood with all her power to prevent that si)oilatiou 
by government which is twice cursed — cursing the spoiler and 
spoilee. Tlie contagion of free government was souglit to be spread 
by example, by intrinsic merit, not by corruption ; not by subjuga- 
tion. There she stood, as afterwards at Manassas stood her im- 
mortal son, "like a stone wall." How rich the moral return was 



17 

shown in the day of her distress, when, from the four comers of the 
earth her sons came trooping to her to lay all they had on earth 
upon the altar of sacrifice for — a mother ! In the high old Roman 
sense she could say: "These are my jewels." There came a day 
when Virginia walked bejeweled from sacrifice to sacrifice — like 
the Eoman mother with her resplendent boys. Washington at the 
beginning, Lee at the end, of Federal Union, attest the ideal of a 
Commonwealth. 

It was a simple and grand old day when, in this city, John Mar- 
shall might have been seen each morning wending his way to the 
Old Market, accompanied by the negro slave, who carried his basket 
for him. The line, dark and dangerous, between power and poverty 
had not then been drawn. If it be replied "the relation between 
white master and black slave was just that line," I answer, it was 
no such dark and dangerous line as exists to-day between the ex- 
tremes of wealth and poverty; between capital and labor. The in- 
terval between Marshall and Marshall's Jack; Wickham and Wick- 
ham's Bob, was spanned by a bridge resting on the two great pillars 
of reverence and sympathy. On these two is laid that structure of 
law and prophets which binds the State together. When the discus- 
sion was transferred to the forum of force, the proof was made con- 
clusive that this government of honor, by honor, and for honor, was 
also the government of love, by love and for love. They who had 
not shrunk from sacrifice, did not shrink from danger. In language 
which cannot be obliterated, they said : "Our bosoms are one." The 
Virginia which had known how to live greatly knew also how to die 
greatly. Death for country was "sweet and beautiful" once more. 
It is all a dreamland of the past, that garden of fragrance and 
bloom ; of beauty and peace. The dying landscape of that "First 
Garden" of free government now wears the quaintness of a van- 
ished age, haunting reminiscence with a beautiful regret. It is a 
memory and a mist. When this Dominion ended, Virginia could 
say, like the last of the Judges — "Whose ox have I taken; of whose 
hands have I received any bribe to blind my eyes therewith?" 
With war's revolution the Book of Judges closed, the Book of Kinsrs 
was opened. 

To all this there is an exceedingly simple answer. The South 
has been condemned at the bar of civilization for holding the negro 
in bondage. Of all the cruel ironies of fate none seems quite so 



18 

sardonic as the turn of ovonts which made Now England tlie judge 
and executioner of Virginia for the sin of slavery. 

In the decade whicli gave a new world to Castile and Leon two 
events conjoined to dramatize, on a colossal scale, that profound 
parable of the talents which, of itself, epitomizes the rise and fall of 
the children of men. Tn this colossal miracle play, the negro of the 
whole unrecorded past Avas seen, like Adam, in one of those old 
plays, standing there waiting to be created. To exchange such con- 
dition of mind and body for usefulness of some kind was the con- 
dition precedent to any rise. A law more immutable than that of 
Medes and Persians; a law which knows no relenting; tlie im- 
placable law of "use or lose," caused to be entered the judgment of 
which involuntary exodus from Africa was execution. Our crimi- 
nal jurisprudence sentences a man to hard labor as a sign of degra- 
dation. Nature sentences a man to hard labor as a sign of pro- 
motion. It is when we reject the sign of promotion, that we incur 
the brand of degradation. 

South of the Great Desert (the slip north of it being really Asia) 
was a continent filled Avith human beings engaged in continuing 
their animal existence; a moral Sahara, as barren of moral use as 
the sea of sand which bounded it. Beyond their existence, what 
very literally was their bare existence, these "heirs of the ages" had 
nothing to show for their inheritance. As title to tlie realty he 
knew not how to use was denied to the red man of America, so by a 
parity of reason, title to an intangible freedom was denied to tlie 
black man of Africa. The laches of six thousand years was the plea 
in bar to any assertion of negro freedom. Loaded down with the 
stagnation of six millenaries; lame and halt with locomotor ataxia 
of the spiritual spine, of what use to himself or others was this free- 
dom — freedom to rot? The sloth of ages had been heaping up 
death to everything save anamilities. By a movement so swift as to 
seem electric, Europe said, "Let us use the idle sinews of the east to 
develop the idle fertilities of the west; out of two refractory nega- 
tions make one intelligent affirmative; thus supplying a reason for 
existence to two continents, otherwise having none." Europe be- 
came a huge employment agency for the idle liands and idle acres of 
two worlds; that two voluntary inutilities might be fashioned into 
involuntary utilities ; and did not trust to baptism unaccompanied 
by works. Lund and the unemployed were brought togetlier on a 



19 

business rather than a philanthropic basis ; but like more modern 
agencies for profit, this too called itself philanthropism. 

The Eed Man, by a mute appeal more eloquent than words, had 
said, "give me liberty, or give me death." The answer came — ■ 
"we will give you death." The negro, who imposed on himself no 
such extreme alternative, took the place thus made vacant. When 
Hawkins made his voyage to the coast of Africa, there to collect a 
cargo of heathen raw material to be built into pious uses, Queen 
Elizabeth lent him her good ship "Jesus," for the prosecution of 
his missionary zeal. One of the few features of the Peace of 
Utrecht which gave general satisfaction (Queen Ann went in person 
to communicate it to the peers) was that Assiento treaty whereby 
the right to supply Spanish colonies with negro slaves was trans- 
ferred to England. A te deum composed by Handel was sung in 
thanksgiving. The elder Pitt made this trade "a central object of 
his policy." Great is England's pride in the Somerset case, wherein 
the greatest judge who ever sat on a common law bench decided that 
the law of England provided no remedy whereby, in England, the 
master could reclaim his slave. At that very time the government 
of England had negatived every effort of Virginia — twtnty-three in 
all — to prohibit the slave trade. 

Nowhere was the profit of this trade enjoyed with keener zest than 
in 'New England. The composition of the first fugitive slave 
law was all her own. The first slave ship of an English 
colony — the "Desire" — was built at Marblehead, Massachusetts. At 
the time of the Declaration of Independence slavery was recog- 
nized by law in each of the thirteen colonies. That declara- 
tion did not suggest the emancipation of a single slave, but did 
arraign George III. for seeking to foment servile insurrection. 

The close of the revolution was signalized by Virginia's gift, not 
of principalities, but of empires — to cement Federal union — called 
a "League of Love." The deed of cession of the northwest territory 
was executed by the delegation of Virginia in Congress, in 1784, 
agreeably to an act of the Legislature passed in 1783. Years after- 
wards, in the debate with Hayne, Mr. Webster took occasion to say 
that by the ordinance of 1787, excluding slavery therein, Nathan 
Dane, who wrote it, thereby became greater "than Solon and Lycur- 
gus, Minos, Kuma Pompilius, and all the legislators and philoso- 
phers of the world." 

The facts are these: Congress accepted this cession and directed 



20 

Jefferson of Virginia, Chase of Maryland, and Howard of Ehode 
Island, to prepare a form of government for this northwest territory. 
Their report, in the handwriting of Jefferson, contained a prohibition 
of slavery after the year 1800. On motion of Mr. Speight of 
North Carolina, to strike out this prohibition. All New England 
voted aye. Every vote, north of Mason and Dixon's line, is re- 
corded in the affirmative. Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina 
voted "no"; North Carolina divided. By the vote of a solid North, 
the prohibition was struck out April 19, 1784.* Afterwards, ne- 
mine contradicente, was passed the ordinance of 1787; reduced to 
writing, it would seem, by Nathan Dane, as amanuensis. The me- 
chanical office discharged by the medium of transcription, sent to 
the rear, we are told, all Greek, all Roman fame. In the succeed- 
ing generation a great orator exclaims: how divine in the donee, in 
the grantee, the recipient! Virginians said — *'we will deny our- 
selves the right to go with our own property (purchased largely 
from you), upon our own soil." This has the aspect of a "self- 
denying ordinance." Virginia chose the sacrifice of self, crowned 
with thorns by the beneficiaries ; rather than the sacrifice which 
crowns itself with place, power, profit — the sweet sacrifice of others. 
She was solicitous to give to freedom a spacious empire from a heart 
more spacious. Webster's praise commemorates a difference of 
ideals — a difference between the name and the reality. 

On October 5, 1778, the General Assembly of Virginia passed an 
act (the first of the session) prohibiting from that date the importa- 
tion of any slave into the Commonwealth, by sea or land. Twenty- 
nine years before England, twenty-nine years before the Congress 
of the United States prohibited the slave trade, Virginia placed her 
abhorrence of it on the statute book. By whom was this law re- 
pealed ? In effect, by the vote of a solid New England, in the con- 
vention of 1787. What old England began. New England com- 
pleted. In the sale of opium to China who is the arch sinner — 
England or the Chinese ? In the importation of slaves by the slave 
trade, was it the slave trader, or his customer, who first and fore- 
most was responsible ? "This infernal traffic," said George Mason, 
"originated in the avarice of British merchants. The British gov- 
ernment constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop 
to it. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had from a 

♦Journals of Congress, Vol. IX, pages 98, 99. 



21 

lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic." "Twenty years," 
said Madison, "will produce all the mischief that can be appre- 
hended from the liberty to import slaves." As between Virginia's 
cession of her northwest territory for the sake of tlie union ; and 
New England's refusal (for the sake of union) to relinciuisli, until 
twenty years had ])assed, "tliis nefarious traffic," which denotes 
sacrifice for union, for freedom, and uiiion for the sake of freedom? 
"We demand," said New England, "our right to fasten upon you 
the fangs of this 'nefarious traffic' for twenty years to come." If 
New England can forgive herself for this, what should she not for- 
give? She did forgive herself without a groan.* 

It was not slavery, it was the slave trade, which John Wesley 
called "the sum of all villainies." This vi^as what New England 
made THE CONDITION PRECEDENT TO UNION. The cap- 
ital invested in the lucrative exchange of rum for negroes could not 
(or would not) sooner adjust itself to the impractical views of Mad- 
ison and Mason. The constitutional power of amendment was in- 
hibited from touching this provision. By profits thus derived, the 
sons of New England, their legatees and distributees, have been en- 
riched. Which of them has flung upon the ground the "tainted 
money ?" Iscariot attained to this. An old maxim tells us : "the re- 
ceiver is as bad as the thief." None, with which I am acquainted, 
makes him worse. Old England and New England handed the for- 
bidden fruit to the South — themselves blind and deaf to the tor- 
ments of the middle passage (to the negro) in their zeal to do so. 
Then rolling up the whites of their eyes, they join to upbraid the 
South for retaining property sold for cash still unreturned by the 

"*As soon as this trade (the slave trade) was cut off by the act of 
Congress of 1807, the sinfulness of it presented itself in glaring colors 
both with our Eastern friends and the British." William Smith, of South 
Carolina, in United States Senate, January 26, 1820. That truly great 
man — great no less for the soundness of his judgment than for the sin- 
cerity of his opinions and the probity of his character — Nathaniel Macon 
of North Carolina, said in the same debate: "With all the sins of hold- 
ing slaves, we have not that of going to Africa for them. They have 
been brought to us by the citizens of the States which hold none. The 
only time in Congress that I ever heard the slave trade defended was 
by a member from the same State with the gentleman from Rhode 
Island. * * * A bill was reported in the Senate to whip those who 
might be in any way engaged in it. The whipping was struck out (not 
by the votes of those who represented slave States), because a rich mer- 
chant might be convicted, and it would not do to whip a gentleman." 



22 

renders. They retained the approving consciences of well-filled 
pockets. That was a wonderful bill of sale, having no parallel, 
which assured to one side excommunication and anathema, and to 
tlie other "prevenient grace." The excommunicated were the same 
who with all their strength had protested against the wrong. They 
who hurled the curse were the same, who, over protest, had inflicted 
the wrong. 

What created tlie difference between States with negro slaves and 
States without them? Difference of climate, soil, production. 
Parallels of latitude voted for or against the negro. The isother- 
mals legislated. Eice, sugar, cotton, tobacco, said, "where we are, 
there is your home." The logic which defined the chasm between 
convictions was the pitiless logic of a line. Eight and wrong were 
geographical. 

My friend, as I esteem it a privilege to call him. Major John W. 
Daniel, in an address at the University of Virginia, quotes Mr. 
Hoar, late Senator from Massachusetts, as saying of JefPerson, "he 
stands in human history as the foremost man of all whose influence 
has led men to govern themselves by spiritual laws." Of all eman- 
cipationists, Jefferson was by far the greatest. As early as 1778 he 
sought to begin the work of emancipation in his own Common- 
wealth. His words of s}Tnpatliy for the slave are often quoted at 
the North. He was, however, an emancipationist, not because of ill 
will to the master, but because of good will to the slave. He was 
the friend, powerful and sincere, of the great struggling masses. It 
was as the sincere democrat that he was hated. That part of the 
constitutional compact which could lend itself to forward the views 
of this man and his school (i. e., the three-fifths representation of 
slaves in States, which cast votes for his school) was obnoxious to 
them to whom his views were visions, not desired to be realized. It 
could not be because of any wish to increase or prolong slavery that 
the Missouri compromise fell upon the ear of Jefferson "like a fire 
bell in the night." "The movement," he said, "is under the false 
front of lessening the evils of slavery, but with the real view of pro- 
ducing a geographical division of parties." To LaFayette he wrote : 
"It is not a moral question, but one merely of power * * * to 
raise a geographical principle for the choice of a president." To 
Mr. Holmes (then of Massachusetts), he wrote these prophetic 
words: "A geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, 
moral or political, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation 



23 

will mark it deeper and deeper." "Thank God," he wrote to John 
Adams, "I shall not live to witness its issue." His race was run. 
Not for himself, but for his country, was his warning. It may be 
that in his far famed ''Declaration" there is "glittering generality." 
It may be "all that glitters is not gold." But no false philosophy 
lurks in tliis brief chronicle. It is the aged wisdom of one who from 
youth to hoary age was freedom's friend. It is his last word and 
testament. "Every new irritation" reveals new depths to it. It is 
that dying declaration, when the eye, in the presence of deatli, is 
purged of the films of self. To him the Missouri question Avas the 
cover under which absolutists stalked their prey. Let the foe tear 
down the outer wall for any purpose, it will be abased for all. He 
saw a movement to make the name of freedom do yeoman service for 
them who were in arms against the reality. (Geography would 
henceforth be their tireless recruit, and slavery the flail wherewith 
to beat down freedom. His was the despair of one who embodied, 
as did no other, the democratic idea. His instinct taught liim when 
to fear and when to hope. He had ho])ed for a rule whose force 
would be justice. He now foresaw a reign whose justice would be 
force. The sanguine labor of his life seemed lost at the close. 
Events seemed to say : "Aha, Jefferson, we have thee on the hip at 
last." Realizing in his old age the triumph which had come to stay 
of nominal over real, he turned his face to the wall. 

John Quincy Adams noted in his diary : "The discussion disclosed 
a secret. It revealed the basis for a new organization of parties."* 

The convention of Northern States which met at Harrisburg to 
outline the tariff of 1828, known as the "Bill of Abominations," was 
the confirmation of Jefferson's forebodings. 

Had Parliament granted to the colonies the right to appear by 
representatives (easily outnumbered liy the rest of the Commons), 

♦"Jealousy of Southern domination had, as we have seen, made the 
Northern Federalists dissatisfied with the purchase of Louisiana. * * * 
The keeping out of new States, and the alteration of the Constitution as 
to the basis of representation, * * were projects too hopeless, as well 
as too unpopular in their origin, to be renewed. The extension to the 
new territory west of the Mississippi, of the ordinance of 1787 against 
slavery, seemed to present a much more feasible method of accom- 
plishing substantially the same object. The idea, spreading with ra- 
pidity, still further obliterated old party lines, tending to produce at 
the North a political union for which the Federalists had so often 
sighed."— Hildreth, Vol. VI, p. 683. 



24 

how nugatory, would have been the colonial vote. So specious was 
the scheme to make the South the milch cow for the North. Real 
consent of the governed would he violated at the threshold. "I 
will," said John Randolph, "put it in the power of no man or set 
of men who ever lived, or who ever shall live, to tax me without my 
consent. It is wholly immaterial whether this is done, without my 
having any representation at all, or, as it was done in the case of 
the tariff law, by a phalanx, stern and inexorable, who, having the 
majority and having the power, prescribe to me the law I shall 
obey * * * The whole slave-holding country, the whole of it 
from the Potomac to Mexico, was placed under the ban and anath- 
ema of a majority of two." The logic of liberty thus spoke. 
That wizzard glance, flashing with a supernatural insight into the 
heart of things, saw in this the shadow of a stroke which would one 
day fall with destructive force; and which destructively has fallen. 
The ounce of prevention would have saved what whole cargoes of 
cure are powerless to remedy. The power which buys legislation 
wholesale is sequence from this antecedence. The injury of the 
many for the profit of the few cannot well have other sequence. 
Once more, the issue between good government and bad govern- 
ment; between free government and slave government turns on 
this — Is public good or selfish greed the propelling power? A 
liberty to be corrupt! Death and decay have that. 

Was it not natural for "practical politicians," who had this 
matter at heart to ponder, by what common bond the States once 
assembled at Harrisburg might be massed again in more formidable 
phalanx and for the answer to flash — "are we not the States called 
free, the other, the States called slave"? Freedom against slav- 
ery — could battle cry be more sublime than that? Lifting up their 
eyes, they looked across the Potomac, the ]\Ionongahela, the Ohio 
and whispered with burning breath — "Lo Xaboth's Vineyard." 

They who might so easily be solid for the name of freedom, why 
not also for the reality of profits? All that was needed was a swap 
of the moral force of freedom for the material force of empire, 
l)rutalizing and diabolizing; all the more infernal, because mas- 
([uerading under the name of love for others — taking in vain that 
holy name. The dangerous enemies of a republic are not the men 
who make open war upon it; but the men who insidiously under- 
mine. 

Events were moving on toward completion, when Andrew Jack- 



25 

son, in his message of January 2, 1835, found it needful to denounce 
the use of the United States mails for the circulation of inflamma- 
tory appeals addressed to the passions of slaves. In such use of the 
mails, the hero of New Orleans could see but one object, viz. : "To 
produce all the horrors of servile war." 

Mr. William Chauncey Fowler, in his book, "The Sectional Con- 
troversy" (published in 1864, when the author was a member of 
the Connecticut Legislature), says, that some fifteen or twenty years 
earlier, as a leading member of Congress, who afterwards became a 
member of a presidential cabinet, was coming out from a heated 
debate, he was asked by the writer, an old college friend : "Will you 
inform me, what is the real reason why Northern men encourage 
these petitions?" (For the abolition of slavery.) He said to me: 
"The real reason is, that the South will not let us have a tariff ; and 
we touch them where they will feel it." It was as if, in the dark- 
ness, a voice was heard which only the wisest then knew how to 
translate, saying : "Go to ; we will wage our war against the name of 
slavery as the most effectual way to defeat once more the ever baffled 
fight against the reality; make African slavery free that industrial 
liberty may be enthralled ; in the name of equality rivet inequality ; 
break one set of fetters for power to forge another." 

Was it a symbol of this tumult, that in the year 1828, the ship of 
the line. Constitution, was surveyed and pronounced unseaworthy; 
her timbers decayed, and the estimated cost of repairs a sum far in 
excess of that expended for original construction? Patriots, not a 
few, were prepared for out and out abolition; or (practically the 
same thing) for the sale at public auction of material, which for 
some other purpose than that of "Ironsides" of liberty, might be 
worked up and made available. Then from a poetic throat rang 
out : "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down" ; and a poetic storm drove 
back the inroad of Goth and Vandal upon the physical emblem; 
upon the name of Constitution. How fared it with the reality; 
with that moral wall, built also as bulwark against the foe, of which 
the wooden wall was emblem ? This also was exhibiting the weather 
stain of storm ; and there were those who would exchange the old 
timbers of tradition for a new fabric, having more of the pageantry 
of power. The assaults were stayed. The ship of state was suf- 
fered to sail on; and upon sufferance sailed. Three decades would 
hardly pass before this ship would be given "to the god of storms" — 
with none to prevent; none to relent. 



26 

The Rev. Nehemiah Adams (whoso last act, hefore leaving Boston 
to seek softer skies for a sick daughter, had been to assist in framing 
the remonstrance of ISTew England clergymen against the extension 
of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska) wrote: "The South was just 
on the eve of abolishing slavery. The abolitionists arose and put it 
back within its innermost entrenchments." As late as December 
11, 1845, an article appeared in the Eichmond Whig advocating the 
abolition of slav(M-y and saying that but for the intemperance of 
Northern P"'anatics, it would be effected. 

In the house of them who felt so keenly their mission to call 
others to repentance, how fared it with the negro ? There no Fed- 
eral Compact could run athwart benevolent intent. In the general 
laws of Massachusetts (compiled in accordance with a resolution of 
February 22, 1822) it is provided: "That no person being an 
African or negro, other than subjects of the emperor of Morocco" — 
(and certified citizens of other States) "shall tarry within this Com- 
monwealth for a longer time than two months." In case of such 
prolonged stay, if after warning and failure to depart, "it shall be 
made to appear that the said person has thus continued within the 
Commonwealth, contrary to the tenor of this act, he or she shall be 
whipped, not exceeding ten stripes, and ordered to depart, and if 
he shall not so depart, the same process shall be had and inflicted, 
and so toties quoties." In March, 1788, this was one of the "per- 
petual laws of the Commonwealth." It passed out of existence 
(subsilentio), in the general repealing section of an act of March 
29, 1834. \^Tien in his reply to Hayne, Webster said : "The past at 
least is secure"; this was part of that past still under the lock and 
key of statute. Among the kindly affectioned slaves of my first 
recollections, remembered by me with a kind affection, I am satisfied 
there was not one who would have sought, or could have found 
eolace, in the hospitable hand extended from 1788 to 1834. Tliey 
who bestowed this liberty of the lash became our angry judge. 
Liberty to be whipped at each recurring sessions of the peace; "and 
so toties quoties !" What a "door of opportunity" for the African — 
"not a subject of the emperor of Morocco." 

When war raged for freedom, how was it then? In September, 
1862, General Dix proposed to remove a number of "contrabands" 
from Fortress Monroe to Massachusetts. To this Governor Andrew 
replied: "I do not concur in any way, or to any degree in the plan 
proposed." The war governor proceeds: "Contemplating, liow- 



27 

ever, the possibility of such removal, permit me to say that the 
Northern States are of all places the worst possihle to select for 
an asylum. * * * I would take the liberty of suggesting 
some Union foothold in the South." In this same month, the 
Adjutant-General inquired of the army of the West: "What 
is to be done with this unfortunate race? * * * You 
cannot send them North. You all know the prejudices of the 
Northern States for receiving large numbers of the colored race. 
Some States have passed laws prohibiting them to come within their 
borders. * * * Look along this river (the Mississippi) and 
see the number of deserted plantations on its borders. These are the 
places for these freed men." Was ever altruism like unto this al- 
truism ? Ever, as with the constancy of natural causes, exercised in 
gome other man's house, on the banks of some far-oif , ancient river. 
On these terms who would not be an altruist? 

"In the State where I live," said John Sherman, on April 2, 1862, 
"we do not like negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my 
friend from Indiana (Mr. Wright) said yesterday, 'The whole peo- 
ple of the Northwestern States are, for reasons, whether correct or 
not, opposed to having many negroes among them, and that principle 
or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation of nearly all the 
Northwestern States.' " 

From an early period in Illinois there had existed a system 
of indenture and registration, whereby the services of negroes were 
bought and sold. At December term, 1828, it was held that "regis- 
tered servants are goods and chattels and can be sold on execution." 
The system had a strong opponent in Edward Coles, who, in the 
words of Nicolay, "though a Virginian," waged relentless war 
against it, beginning his reform in his own house. He eman- 
cipated his own slaves. WTiere are the paeans of praise to 
him? The paeans are reserved for another who begins and 
continues his reforms in some other man's house. On the 
12th of February, 1853, an act was passed, making it a crime for 
a negro to come, or be brought, into the State, providing that any 
such negro who remained therein ten days should be fined fifty 
dollars, and in case of inability to pay the fine should be sold to any 
person who would pay the costs of the trial. The State constitution 
of 1848 directed the General Assembly "to pass such laws as will 
effectually prohibit free persons of color from emigrating to or set- 
tling in this State, and to prevent the owners of slaves from bring- 



28 

ing them into the State for the purpose of setting them free." The 
air north of the Ohio was too })ure — for slaves? No — for free 
negroes — to breathe. 

In those days, where was the citizen of Illinois so renowned for 
the wish to put slavery "in the course of ultimate extinction?" 
Wliere the thunders against the Black Code of Illinois? Herndon 
says : "The sentiment of the majority of Springfield tended in the 
opposite direction, and, thus environed, Lincoln lay down like a 
sleeping lion!"' The lion heart, the coeur de lion of romance, is not 
one of profound slumber when danger is abroad, but of fearless on- 
set on the foe against whatever odds. Surely there must have been 
as much "environment" for Jefferson. The hero is brave in his own 
environment, not in some other man's far-off environment. Whether 
girt by friend or foes, the flame that warms his heart burns on his 
lip. He sees in the evil that is nearest the duty that is nearest. 
Here was the bill of attainder of a race. Who rose in Congress to 
call for an investigation? Who grew hysterical over that? "The 
misery before their eyes," said Randolph; "they cannot see — their 
philanthropy acts only at a distance."* 

*In the debate on the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, 
it had been moved as an amendment, that the liberated slaves should be 
distributed among the free States of the North — pro rata — according to 
the population of each. As to this, on the 19th of March, 1862, Mr. 
Doolittle said, in the United States Senate: "I can give you a case di- 
rectly in point. A very distinguished gentleman was elected to Con- 
gress; I believe about 1843. One of the well-to-do farmers in his 
neighborhood called upon him, the evening before he was to leave for 
Washington, to pay his respects. He found him in his office, and told 
him he had called for that purpose, and to bid him good-bye. 'And now, 
judge,' said he, 'when you get to Washington I want to have you take 
hold of this negro business and dispose of it in some way or other; have 
slavery abolished, and be done with it.' 'Well,' said the judge, 'as the 
people who own these slaves, or claim to own them, have paid money for 
them, and hold them as property under their State laws, would it not be 
just, if we abolish slavery, that some provision should be made to make 
them compensation?' He hesitated, thought earnestly for a while, and 
in serious tone replied : 'Yes, I think that would be just, and I will stand 
my share of the taxes.' 'But.' said the judge, 'there is one other ques- 
tion; when the negroes are emancipated, what shall be done with them? 
They are a poor people; they will have nothing; there must be some 
place for them to live. Do you think it would be any more than fair 
for us to take our share of them?' 'Well, what would be our share in 
the town of Woodstock?" he inquired. The judge replied, 'There are 



29 

In the Taylor and Cass campaign of 1848, Lincoln spoke in 
Boston. Herndon says : "Referring to the anti-slavery men, he said 
they were better treated in Massachusetts than in the West, and, 
turning to William S. Lincoln of Worchester, who had lived in 
Illinois, he remarked, that 'in that State they had recently killed one 
of them.' This allusion to Lovejoy's murder at Alton was thought 
by the Free Sellers to be heartless, and it was noted that Mr. Lincoln 
did not repeat it in other speeches." Had some Southern man in 
Boston made the same speech it would have been cited, as an in- 
stance of the "barbarism of slavery." As the case, in point of fact, 
stands, perhaps "expressive silence" may be becoming. 

The press and pulpits of the ISTorth have Joined to denounce Chief 
Justice Taney for deciding (as alleged) at December term, 1856, 
that "the negro had no rights which a white man was bound to 
respect." It is the kind of candor one would evince who should 
claim "the Bible says, 'there is no God'"; because the Bible does 
say, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." What Taney 
did say was that at the time of the Declaration of Independence and 
when the Constitution was adopted, such was the case. He followed 
this by illustrations, demonstrations rather, from the laws of N"ew 
England and other States, and it may be the demonstrations were 
irritations. What made tliem peculiarly offensive was the impossi- 
bility of refutations. The dictum of Taney was incontrovertibly 
true. Tills incorruptible jurist, "in early life manumitted all the 
slaves he inherited from his father. The old ones he supported by 

about 2,500 people in Woodstock; and if you take the census, you will 
find that there will be about one for every six white persons; so that 
here in Woodstock, our share would be about 500.' 'What!' said he, 
'five hundred negroes in Woodstock! Judge, I called to pay my respects, 
I bid you good evening'; and he started for the door, and mounted his 
horse. As he was about to leave, he turned round and said, 'Judge, I 
guess you need not do anything more about the negro on my account.' 
(Laughter.) Mr. President, perhaps I am not going too far when I say 
that honorable gentleman sits before me now (Mr. Collamer)." Mr. 
Collamer: "As the gentleman has called me out, I may be allowed to 
say, that the inhabitants of the town were about three thousand, and the 
proportion was about one to six." What an exalted conscience should 
be attributed to them, who, with delirious imprecation upon all who 
might demur, made peremptory demand for an acknowledgment of a 
freedom and equality for the 4.000.000 negroes at the South, which the 
demandant 60 frankly, even fiercely, shouted to the four winds would 
be intolerable for themselves? 



30 

monthly allowances of money till they died." He differed by the 
distance which puts the poles asunder from them whose absorbing 
passion is to emancipate something which belongs to others; dif- 
fered toto coelo from the philanthropy — feted, crowned, exultant — 
whose most conspicuous trait is omnipresence of self. He is in the 
roll of those great judges who have discharged the grandest of 
human duties; first with intrepid vision to ascertain the truth; 
then, with a moral courage that knows no danger to fearlessly an- 
nounce it. For the supreme cause of justice he was not afraid nor 
ashamed to live and to die poor: ''The worthiest kings have ever 
loved least state." But could he appear once more on this earth, 
and could the old tests of elevation of mind and manners, purity of 
life, conviction and the courage of conviction, be again invoked, then 
of all his defamers there could not be found one worthy to so much 
as stoop down to unloose the latchet of his shoe. 

In 1846 the economic battle had been won so completely that in 
1857 tariff burdens were still further reduced; Massachusetts voting 
with Virginia to this end. Tlie leaders of both parties then joined 
in enacting the lowest revenue tariff which had been known since 
1820. Dogma was put to rout by the event. The fallacy of 
hostile views was transfixed by the result. The retort to the proph- 
ecy of evil was the superlative satire of fact. Experience had been 
the Great Expounder. From the end of the war with Mexico to the 
beginning of the war between the States, had it not been for the 
w^ar waged by one-half of the States upon the domestic institutions 
of the other, the Union would have been in the happy state of having 
no annals; no financial, no economic issue; no broil w4th foreign 
parts ; no anarchy at home. There is no pillow of rest for freedom. 
In the decade between 1840 and 1850 the warder on the watch 
tower had been the great son; I had almost said tlie great soul, of 
South Carolina. In blistering speech, Calhoun had defined the 
bond which held the gathering host of pillage. He called it "the 
cohesive power of public plunder." The spoils system, he said, 
'••must ultimately convert the whole body of office-holders into cor- 
rupt sycophants and supple instruments of power" ; and, again, "let 
us not deceive ourselves — the very essence of free govermnent con- 
sists in considering public offices as public trusts." With what 
subtle analysis, ground fine in debate, he stripped naked the sophis- 
tries of senates : with what "iron worded proof" he chained truth to 
truth. The high, the brave, the incon-uptible, must make enemies; 



31 

and the his/her, the hraver, the firmer, and more discernins: tFie 
sense of duty, the more implacable the enmity. He, too, is entitled 
to be "loved for the enemies he made." The man whom corruption 
is powerless to corrupt shall he not be hateful to corruption? His 
moral force had matched itself, not in vain against the "corrupt 
squadron." The event which changed his hope into despair was 
the war with Mexico. He saw in the victory of war the direst men- 
ace to the victory of peace ; in the midst of vociferation for the 
"rights of man," he saw the rights of States undone; an imprac- 
ticable freedom made the pretext for the destruction of a possible 
and extant one. "Every senator," he said, "knows that I was op- 
posed to that war, but no one knows but myself the depth of that op- 
position. With my conception of its character and consequences, it 
was impossible for me to vote for it." The smoke is rolling away 
from the senate chamber scene where this tall, vivid form, meet 
tabernacle of prophetic fire, towered in power and in purity. The 
smoke is rolling away. But the grandeur which gave battle there, 
unconquered then, unconquerable now — cannot be rolled away. 

The crisis came with the victory. The more demonstration of the 
true general welfare the greater the storm which would overturn 
proof by force. As the fated bark glided on the smooth wave of 
success, louder and louder grew the roar of a cataract toward whose 
rage the irresistible torrent of the time was sweeping. All 
that had been won would be dashed to pieces in this fury. 
Who are they to-day whose breasts so quake with terror at 
the thought of competition with the foreigner ? Those into 
whose lap the fruit will fall be excluding competition; the same who 
underbid Europe for the delivery of steel products in South Africa ; 
for viaducts joining Burma to South China ; rails for the holy rail- 
way from Beirut to Medina; for industrial triumphs in the anti- 
podes. These lusty exporters, with tears in their eyes, demand that 
their fellow citizens be restrained from dealing with the "man of 
sin" abroad, with whom they themselves so lucratively deal. The 
foreigner receives preferential treatment under a tariff for the pro- 
tection of the native. After enactment of laws called "patriotic" 
to protect native toil against the "pauper labor" of Europe, there 
is then brought in ship load after ship load of the aforesaid "pauper 
labor" to do the work which, with such timely forethought, had been 
protected from such labor. It is a benevolence which, on the plea 
of raising wages, raises the price of all tilings bought with wages. 



32 

Ah ! those happy isles of the "protected" in the midst of a sea of 
troubles (growing year by year more troublesome) ; at this time 
breaking in wrathful agonies upon all the coasts of power ! 

Special privileges to a few, for the sake of the poor ! Is not that 
like feeding the ravens for the sake of the doves? Ilie man whose 
name is the synonym for treachery was much bent upon converting 
ointment into cash for tlie sake of the poor; "not because lie cared 
for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bore 
what was put therein." Samuel Johnson had no such thorough 
paced sympathy with the doctrine, "Taxation no Tyranny," as have 
the citizens of Commonwealths which, in Johnson's day, rose in arms 
against the doctrine. But when was taxation ever tyranny to the 
tyrant? Importunate is the rush of patriots to clamor for the in- 
crease, to inveigh against the decrease of public burdens. "Can you 
expect us to live," they cry, "if the load is lifted?" Xever did 
Eoman Procurator more savagely protest against being curtailed of 
his spoil. Does this patronized pursuit of happiness for the sake of 
the patrons proceed from love of others or from the love of self — 
cruel as the grave? What is the Standard Oil monopoly against 
which is hurled such malediction? Simply a thoroughly perfected 
method to exterminate competition. A liberty of the strong against 
the weak wild beasts have that. Because they can rise no higher 
they are wild beasts. Predatory wealth has been built up by pred- 
atory laws. 

With a simple dignity befitting senates, on the 11th of January, 
1861, Mr. E. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia, spoke as follows : "I have 
often heard Mr. Calhoun say that most of the conflicts in every gov- 
ernment would be found at last to result in the contests between two 
parties, which he denominated the tax consuming and the tax paying 
parties. The tax consuming party, he said, was that which fed 
upon the revenues of the government, the spoils of office, the bene- 
fits of unequal class legislation. The tax paying party was that 
which made the contributions to the government by which it was 
supported; and expected nothing in return but the general benefits 
of its protection and legislation. And he said, and said wisely, in 
my opinion, that whenever the tax consuming party, as he called it, 
got possession of the government, tlie people must decay and the 
government must either go to pieces or assume another and different 
form. 

"Now, sir, I say that the working of our present executive system 



33 

is such as to produce a party of that description in the country, and 
give it the power of ruling our affairs." 

Tlie danger signal was that the bond or union for the tax-con- 
suming party was geographical. The dominion of the Xorth would 
move on with the invariable sequence of the processes of nature. 
The natural result would be a government of the South by the 
North and for the Xorth; a government under which the South 
would have no rights which the Xorth would be bound to respect. 

Eiehard Henry Lee, in October, 1787, wrote to Edmund Ran- 
dolph, "The representatives of the seven Northern States, as they 
have a majority, can by law create a most oppressive monopoly upon 
the five Southern States, whose circumstances and productions are 
essentially different; although not a single man of these voters is 
representative of, or amenable to, the people of the Southern States. 
Can such a set of men be, with the least semblance of truth, called 
representatives of those they make laws for ?" George Mason said : 
"A majority of interests will oppress the minority" and refused to 
vote for the Constitution in Federal or State convention. 

The distinguished gentleman, late secretary of war, more lately 
still a successful candidate for the highest Federal office, in a speech 
at Kansas City some years ago, described the attitude of protec- 
tionists toward Philippine products, as "the quintessence of selfish- 
ness." Class legislation, in general, may be so defined. But it is; 
so, most abhorrently, when it operates to rally section against sec- 
tion, by making burden to one bounty to the other. Better way 
could not be devised for breeding a ruling class to which honest con- 
ditions nmst be intolerable. The same distinguished gentleman, in 
an address, delivered last July, at the Courthouse in Bath county, 
described the opposite of free government. Abroad, he said, people 
saw in government "an entity different from themselves; in a 
sense antagonistic to themselves." When people feel that 
their government is their own, one for which they are re- 
sponsible, that the administration of justice represents their own 
conviction of what is just ; so long, said the speaker, "we can count 
on a continuance of fi'ee government." But why go abroad for the 
object lesson which on such continental scale, has been seen at home ? 
The Kepublican party, said Wendall Phillips, "is a party of the 
Xorth pledged against the South." 

In 1856, Eufus Choate, in contemplation of a government thus 
acquired by the Xorth, wrote: "I tui'n my eyes from the conse- 



34 

quences. To the fifteen States of the South that government will 
appear an alien government. It will appear worse. It will appear 
a hostile government." Was the government organized in 1861 
"responsive to the will of the people," or responsive to the will of a 
North "pledged against the South?" Was it unnat;ural for them 
against whom it was "pledged" to see in it "an entity different 
from themselves; in a sense antagonistic to themselves"; and to feel 
they could not "count on a continuance of free government" if this 
became supreme? It was as if the word went forth, "That which 
moral force has wrung from us, by material force shall be reversed; 
persuasion having failed to win your voluntary vote, we must needs 
have corruption by coercion." The policy to procure this result had 
been championed as that of "a higher law than the Constitution." 
A far higher law, coeval with man's aspiration to be free ; not at 
variance with the Constitution, but intended to be secured thereby; 
was the right of a free people to be free of alien rule. 

As incident to the war of 1861, "and as a fit and necessary war 
measure," in September, 1862, was issued a paper which (with the 
sequel 100 days later) is called "proclamation of emancipation." 
By this in portions of the country called rebellious, slaves were 
made free, unless by the 1st of January, 1863, said communities 
ceased to rebel. Slave ownership was to be the reward of loyalty; 
slave abolition the penalty of rebellion. This might be translated ; 
"negroes shall continue to be slaves to their masters if only their 
masters will be slaves to us. Let us have in peace the jobs which 
are in sight and your slaves may reap in peace your harvests, taxed 
only by our tariffs. We will let you have your slaves if you will 
let us have your freedom." After this offer had been made and 
rejected, who had a right to say that the South was fighting for 
slavery, or Lincoln for freedom ? 

As in the South construed, the motive was not to free the slave, 
but to enslave the free. The proclamation of September 22, 1862, 
states : "The executive government of the United States, including 
the military and naval authority thereof, M'ill recognize the freedom 
of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons or 
any of them in any ift'ort^ they may make for their actual free- 
dom." 

In October, 1863, Lord Brougham (an abolitionist ab initio), 
referring to this ])roclamation, said: "Hollow we may well call it, 
for those who proclaimed emancipation confess that it was a measure 



35 

of hostility to the whites and designed to produce slave insurrection 
from which the much enduring nature of the unliappy negro saved 
the country. My esteemed friend, the prelate, who exalts by his 
virtues the name of Wilberforce which he inlierits, declared that the 
authors of the proclamation cared as little for the blacks' freedom 
as the whites'; and now they call for the extermination of one race 
to liberate the other."* 

*"Mr. Lincoln comes from Illinois — a State more purely and angrily- 
free soil than any other — strongly anti-slavery — but at least as strongly 
anti-negro. All blacks, whether slave or free, are, we believe, by an act 
of the Legislature, excluded from that inhospitable district. * * * 
As to the actual operation of the edict in the South, we ourselves believe 
that except in a few districts near towns or posts in the neighborhood 
of the Federal camps, it will prove a mere brutum fulmen: that the 
slaves dare not rise, do not wish to rise, do not hate their masters, and 
except for the sake of idleness, and on special occasions do not desire 
freedom. But this cannot have been Mr. Lincoln's conception. He 
must have believed that it would be the strongest and most effective 
measure of hostility which he could adopt towards the Confederate 
States; * * * in a word, that it would rouse against the slave- 
holders a formidable force of domestic foes. He must have designed, 
one would suppose — if he had any definite design at all — and expected — • 
if he had any distinct hopes of benefit from his decree — that his procla- 
mation would rouse the black race against the white; would turn the 
arms of 4,000,000 of half barbarous Africans against their former mas- 
ters; would at the very least, disorganize the entire social system in the 
South, and put a stop to the usual processes of industry and culture, 
and introduce a fearful state of anarchy and chaos. He must have 
hoped this; he must have been prepared for massacre, rapine and devas- 
tation. We confess that in our eyes few crimes can be greater than 
that, the guilt of which he has possibly incurred, voluntarily, and with 
his eyes open." — North British Review, November, 1862, pp. 262-265. 
Of an earlier proclamation Bancroft writes that to intimidate the Vir- 
ginians, Dunmore announced he would declare freedom to the slaves. 
The historian adds: "The offer of freedom to the negroes came very 
oddly from the representatives of the nation which had sold them to 
their present masters, and of the king who had been displeased with 
Virginia for its desire to tolerate that inhuman traffic no longer." — 
Bancroft's History, Vol. VI, ch. iv, p. 146. In the discussion leading 
to the treaty of Ghent, John Quincy Adams demanded satisfaction for 
property in slaves, although (as understood at the time) Clay and 
Gallatin evinced a willingness to relinquish the claim. Accordingly, 
the first article of the treaty, providing for restoration of places 
taken by one country from the other, stipulated that this should 
be done "without any destruction or carrying away of any public prop- 



36 

The late Henry Ward Beecher, descanting on the advantages of 
education, once drew an illustration from the war between North 
and South. "Southern leaders," he remarked, "are accustomed to 
say, 'The North wore us out.' " He then added: "It is this lasting 
power which education gives." In 1864 Grant took comfort in the 
thought that at last (to use his words) "the cradle and the grave 
had been robbed" to sustain the unequal tight of a brave people for 
their native earth. For that pathos of heroism ; for that death grap- 
ple in the dark, a whole world had only a breast of stone. The old 
patriarch, already, had sent his last son to the front, and now for 
lack of younger lives, nothing was left but to go himself, that, in the 
last rally, from his veins might flow the sacred wine which pours 
for country. Then in tlie brooding mind the thought arose, since 
the strength opposed must diminish with each blow struck, while a 
whole world's strength is ours, if now cataract after cataract in 
terrific force descend, no matter how often in bloody foamings to be 
hurled back, the rock of resistance piecemeal must crumble and 
melt in the corroding deluge. Such was the felicitous and bold de- 
sign which bound the wreath of glory. The greatness of Grant, it 
has been said upon the platform, consisted in his firm faith, that 
unfailing numbers ultimately must wear out a foe, on anything 
like equal terms, unconquerable. To the moral force, which again 
and again hurls back preponderant numbers, there can be made no 
answer, save that of a brute force, which, by sheer attrition, shall 
wear out the attenuated body, on which this constancy is staye^.. 
With what result? To make the unchallenged sceptre of brute 
force the final form of greatness; to make the fountain and well- 
head of the altruistical "new birth of freedom" the apotheosis of 

erty, or of slaves, or other private property." For alleged violation of 
what was here stipulated, the question of indemnity was referred to the 
Emperor of Russia. To Mr. Middleton, Minister at St. Petersburg, John 
Quincy Adams as Secretary of State, wrote in 1820: "The emancipation 
of the enemy's slaves is not among the acts of legitimate war; as relates 
to the owners, it is a destruction of private property nowhere warranted 
in the usages of war." 

The National Intelligencer of April 20, 1863, quotes the Boston Com- 
monwealtli as follows: It (the proclamation) is "an edict which binds 
every slave we can bind, and frees every slave we cannot free." The 
writer was one of a delegation to visit the President, and states: The 
President asked "what would we do with the negroes if they should 
come to us?" 



37 

brute force — fit precursor of the fine brute majority, which in Sen- 
ates crushes conscience. 

When on one side the last man so easily could be, in point of 
fact, was drawn, and each gap in the ranks, as it was made, be filled 
only by closing up more closely ; while the other, from the start, so 
easily was able to lose two and more for one ; with a whole world in 
the rear from which to recruit each gap, the consequence derived 
by Beecher partakes of the non sequitur. When Xerxes wore out 
by "attrition" the Spartans at Thermopylae, was that the lasting 
power of education in the victor? Or was a higher education for 
the storm of life evinced by those valiant arms which again and 
again hurled back numerical ascendency, and still hurling, while 
strength endured, fell finally where they fought? They who stand 
in the last ditch, to hold up the sinking standard of their faith, or 
fall with it ; they who fall for their altars and their fires, can always 
send word to their country: "Here obedient to thy laws we fall." 
He who, in stout resistance to the odds against him, succumbs only 
to the last conqueror, has been schooled in the discipline and doc- 
trine of life, is both hero and scholar. To conquer the difficult is 
the first command of education, and the second is like unto it — not 
to be dismayed by difficulty. Education is the strain of him who 
overcomes; or who, undaunted to the end, puts forth all that in 
him is to be not overcome. If fall he must, he falls unjoii- 
quered. He has been faithful until death. If, as in the republic 
of which Plato dreamt, education is the growth out of selfishness 
into self-sacrifice, lack of education was not the serious deficiency. 

By the endless attrition of endless numbers, and under the ever- 
tightening coil on coil of the anaconda stranglehold, the South was 
drawing to the end of her agonized strain; when Lincoln, in the 
Second Inaugural, likened by some to the prophecy of Isaiah — with, 
as he explained, "malice toward none, charity toward all" — sug- 
gested a possible prolongation of the war, "until all the wealth piled 
up by the l)ondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash 
shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As it was said 
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said : 'The judgments 
of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.' " The epitome of 
Reconstruction was in these words, Mr. Labouchere said of an 
English statesman that he did not find fault with him for being 
found occasionally with an ace up his sleeve. Wliat he did find 



38 

fault with was the claim that the ace had been put there by the 
Providence of God. 

In 1862 as part of the work of a constitutional convention held 
at Springfield, Illinois, were the following sections of Article XVIII, 
of a proposed constitution: (1) No negro or mulatto shall migrate 
to or settle in this State after the adoption of this constitution, 
(2) No negro or mulatto shall have the right of suffrage or hold any 
office of this State. (3) The general assembly shall pass all laws 
necessary to carry into effect the provisions of this article. 

In the convention the first was adopted by a vote of 59 to 7 ; the 
second by a vote of 42 to 18, and the last by a vote of 45 to 18. 
This article was submitted to a special vote of the people, each 
section was approved by a majority ; the constitution itself was 
defeated by a majority of 16,051 votes; but the vote on Article 
XVIII was as follows : The first section was approved by a ma- 
jority of 100.590 votes; the second by a majority of 176,291 votes, 
only 35,649 voting against it, and the final section was passed by a 
majority of 154,524 votes. Where was the lash for them who, 
under the Illinois act of 1853, reduced freedom to bondage, and by 
these provisions ))rohibited the negro all entrance into the State? 
The answer is obvious, ^^^lat politics could reside in such intru- 
sion? But did he who, in one decade, threw his mantle over the 
killing of Lovejoy, acquire in the next a right to corroborate his 
wrath by that of the Almighty ? Nay, had he not been of counsel 
for a Kentucky master, seeking to recover fugitive slaves? If 
slavery was malum per se, how did that master's sin surpass his 
own? Lincoln's l)iographer, Mr. Joseph H. Barrett, is much com- 
forted to have such good ]n-oof, "after all that has been said to the 
contrary, that he had no olijection to a good client with a bad cause."' 
What ! Philanthropy could turn coat for a fee ! Xo man has a 
right to be indifferent to the transgression going on around hiin. 
But the transgression which concerns liim most nearly is his own. 
For indifference here, he does not quite compound by "bloody in- 
structions" for the rest of mankind. Prophecy is relieved of much 
that were afflictive, when the prophets, instead of dwelling sadly on 
their own sins, confine their message to dwelling gratefully on tlie 
sins of otliers. They who were "of purer eyes than to behold in- 
iquity," undoubtedly had no eyes for their own.* 

♦History as taught to-day in school and pulpit poorly prepares the 
mind for the inconsistencies of altruism. By the Revised Statutes of 



39 

On June 1, 1862, Colonel (afterwards General) Thomas Kilby 
Smith, of the Union army, wrote home, of "the spacious lawns and 
parks, and cultivated grounds kept trim and neat" in Mississippi; 

Ohio, published in 1860, and in force August 1, 1860, it is, by an act 
passed April 2, 1859, provided, "That the judge or judges of any 
election held under the authority of any of the laws of this State, shall 
reject the vote of any person offering to vote at such election, and 
claiming to be a white male citizen of the United States, whenever it 
shall appear to such judge or judges that the person so offering to vote 
has a distinct and visible admixture of African blood." Further, a fine, 
not exceeding $500, and imprisonment for not more than six months is 
the penalty for receiving the vote of any person who has a distinct and 
visible admixture of African blood. — 1 Ohio Revised Statutes, Swan 
and Critchfleld (1860), pp. 548, 549. 

The constitution of Iowa, published in the General Statutes of 1860 
(p. 990), has: Every ichite male citizen of the United States of the age 
of twenty-one years, etc., shall be entitled to vote. 

The Revised Statutes of Wisconsin, published in 1878 (repeated in the 
annotated statutes published in 1889), under Article III of the constitu- 
tion (p. 19), has this: "Every male person of the age of twenty-one 
years belonging to either of the following classes, who shall have re- 
sided, etc., shall be deemed a qualified elector: 

(1) White citizens of the United States. (2) White persons of for- 
eign birth who shall have declared their intention to become citizens, 
etc. (3) Persons of Indian blood, who have once been declared by law 
of Congress to be citizens of the United States. (4j Civilized persons 
of Indian descent, not members of any tribe; provided, that the legis- 
lature may at any time extend by law the right of suffrage to persons 
not herein enumerated. 

The constitution of Michigan, prefixed to the compilation by Thomas 
M. Cooley, under an act of the legislature, approved February 2, 1857, 
has Article VII, section 1, repeats in substance the foregoing (I Com- 
piled Laws, p. 62) ; as does Article VII, section 1, of the Constitution of 
Minnesota, in Revision of Statutes, published in 1867. 

1 Pardon's Digest of the Laws of Pennsylvania, published in 1862 
(p. 375), prescribes: '"No person shall be permitted to vote at any elec- 
tion, as aforesaid, other than a tvhite freeman of the age of twenty-one 
years or more." The House of Representatives of Pennsylvania on 
"Wednesday passed the bill to prevent the immigration into the State of 
negroes and mulattoes." — National Intelligencer. March 27, 1863. 

In 1830, Benton, in the Senate, referred to the expulsion of a great 
body of free colored people, numbering, perhaps, 10,000, from the State 
of Ohio: "The Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Webster) so copious 
and encomiastic upon the subject of Ohio, so full and affecting upon the 
topic of freedom, and the rights of freemen in that State, was incom- 
prehensibly silent and fastidiously mute upon the question of this 



40 

of the slaves in the fields, "running to the fences to see us pass, and 
to chaff with the men." On July 11th he wrote : "A man here with 
1,000 or 1,500 acres is a prince. His slaves fare better than our 
working farmers." In the moral judgment of time, will not free- 
dom to work in Misisssippi sustain a contrast with freedom to be an 
outcast north of the Ohio? One more word from this officer and 
gentleman, bearing date July 28th : "Seventeen hundred people 
have left Memphis within three days, rather than take the oath of 
allegiance. Leaving, they have sacrificed estate, wealth, luxury." 
War meant this for the South. Self was annihilated. The annihi- 
lation of self was in death grapple with tlie coronation of self-moral 
with material power. 

In the fascinating autobiography of Augustus Hare is narrated; 
"Bayard mentioned a Southern lady, who, when the army of lil)era- 
tion approached, entrusted all her silver and jewels to her slaves, 
and they brought it back safely after the army had passed." In the 



wonderful expatriation." Tlie Bill of Rights of Oregon (published by 
authority of an act approved February 25, 1901) prohibits the free 
negro or mulatto from coming within the State; from holding real 
estate, making contracts, or maintaining suit therein; and provides 
for the punishment of persons who shall bring such into the State, 
harbor or employ them. 

On September 22, 1862, General T. W. Tuttle proposed to ship 
to Chicago for employment "contraband negroes." The Mayor of 
Chicago promptly replied: "Your proposition to send negroes to 
Chicago to work would be in violation of the laws of the State, 
and a great injustice to the laboring population. I cannot give 
my consent." The Common Council resolved, "That we Aldermen 
of the city of Chicago heartily approve of the action of our Mayor, 
relating to the proposal to send negroes to this city." (National 
Intelligencer. October 30. 1862.) A month later was published: '•In- 
dictments have been found in .Jersey county court against Lieutenant- 
Colonel Milton S. Littlefield, Fourteenth Cavalry, and Adjutant Wil- 
liam A. Scott, Fourteenth Illinois Infantry." Each brought home a ser- 
vant from the war, and hence the indictment. (Ibid., November 4, 
1862.) 

The slave was welcomed for the sake of hurt to the master, 
not from love for the slave. Mr. William Chauncey Fowler (Sec- 
tional Controversy, p. 205), repeats a statement of Governor Chase 
to W. D. Chadwick Glover (December 27, 1859) : "I do not wish to have 
the slave emancipated because I love him, but because I hate his mas- 
ter." Here, from a high source, is the working theory. A "new birth 
of freedom," thus inspired might be expected to point less directly to 
reformation than revenge. 



trial fire of war the negro said: "I obey where I revere." Could 
consent of the governed be more authentically certified? Under 
similar conditions would philanthropy in the Philippines receive a 
vote of confidence like this? 

Dr. A. B. Mayo, of Massachusetts, in the report of the bureau of 
education (1900-1901), writes: "Here in contact with a superior 
class, through a period of more than 200 years, this people under- 
went the most rapid and effectual transition from the depths of 
pagan barbarism to the threshold of a Christian civilization on re- 
cord in the annals of mankind. The 250 years of slavery had, in- 
deed, been in itself a great university and the history of the world 
may be challenged to present a spectacle so remarkable." The world's 
great awkward squad demanded the drill master's autocracy. South- 
ern slavery was the reform school of tlie negro. 

One who would make assurance doubly sure should give heed 
to the following from the New York Nation, of March 25, 
1869: "We may well call attention of the philanthropist and 
Christian to Dr. Draper's estimate of the religious status of the 
Southern slave at the beginning of the war. He declares that, 
'through the benevolent influence of the white women of the South, 
and not through the ecclesiastical agency was the Christianization 
of the African race accomplished; a conversion which was neither 
superficial nor nominal, but universal and complete ; and the annals 
of modern history offer no parallel success.' " The paragraph di- 
vulges what might be termed the summum bonum of missionary 
achievement; a higher race sharing with a lower the moral ideas 
which give eminence to the higher. This can receive no lesser name 
than the hallowed name of an evangel. All other sources of en- 
lightened conscience, of self-respecting growth, of conversion to 
higher standards are futilities in coinparison. Tlie fittest to sur- 
vive used their higher power, not to destroy the unfit, but to make 
the less fit more fit. No "sounding brass" resounded for these un- 
obtrusive women. Self contemplation would seem to have been 
absent; only the religious truth of duty present. They asked none 
to read their gentle manners in the mirror of their Christian works; 
wrote no articles in magazines, besought not others to do so — to tell 
mankind how true, how beautilul, how good they were. Save in the 
sentence quoted, they have received no mention; a not uncommon 
incident of the benevolence which is for the sake of helping others 
and not for the means of promoting self. They in their modesty 



42 

illumine the text, wliich, though Jacobinical, is fine : "Perish our 
memory rather than our country." "Not unto us, not unto us," 
they said. As if they caught the purity of the sky to which 
their hearts were lifted, they 'shed abroad a Saviour's love,' among 
the humble folk in whose dark plight (as from old England and 
New England they had been received) the ministries of these un- 
recorded women were as stars. The chastened sanctity of their toil 
rises before us as a beatitude of the discipline and duty of life. 
They are in the number of those great teachers who transfigure into 
beauty the imnost force and feeling of high calling, and by so 
doing, lift toward their likeness the ignorant and stumbling. Puri- 
fied love of the highest shone in purified piety to the lowest. The 
slave had been civilized by Christianity, even if spared the curri- 
culum of post-graduate courses and sesthetical belles lettres. Never 
was a great trust so greatly discharged. 

By old England and by New England a trusteeship for the in- 
veterate savage had been imposed. The authority of wliite over 
black was a spiritual supremacy. A higher social consciousness had 
reclaimed the negro from a savage sociology; out of dark chaos had 
educed something of moral symmetry. The negro had been trained 
in the school of discipline. What is civilized man, as he exists to- 
day, but the pupil of all the adverse strokes of time? The negro 
felt himself subject to higher powers, to a government which was 
in sympathy with the governed. With what measure of sympathy 
it was meted out, with that measure it was meted back by the slave 
in the stress of war. It was a high, not a low, ideal of supremacy 
which was loved, honored and obeyed. The sincerity of a common 
cause had been wrought into the heart and habit of a race. Not 
quite two years ago, hard by the plantations once owned by Patrick 
Henry and John Randolph, I could have pointed you to the home of 
one, whose former slaves, with a reverence not assumed, but real, 
still addressed as "Mistis" the venerable lady of the manor, who, 
like another queen, might have celebrated her reign of three score 
years over a loyalty which had never wavered, never faltered. A 
higher force had so far counteracted the lower as to convert the 
lower into sympathy with the higher. How does the higher ac- 
complish this? By taking merit from the lower? No; but by im- 
parting merit to the lower. The higher is such, not by what is 
taken, but by what is given. The slaves had been taught in the 
school and out of the book of good example. They were pupils of 



43 

the "old masters." From them the slave had acquired that which 
is the secret of all growth ; the trait of truly perceiving and then of 
truly revering a higher than himself. They had been taught the 
military lesson of well-disciplined duty; and taught so well that, 
when the master was fighting in the field, fidelity to discipline, de- 
votion to duty, were unabated. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, herself a de- 
scendant of the pilgrims, writing of Boston at a time when this 
humane city was still a slave mart, says : "Xegro children were ad- 
vertised to be sold hy the pound as other merchandise,"' citing proof. 
"We have," she adds, "a few records of worthy black servants who 
remind us of the faithful black house servants of old Southern 
families." "These are the men," said Wilson, of Massachusette, of 
the freedmen after the war, "who have been elevated from chattel- 
hood to manhood." Yes, but it was Massachusetts which sold them 
into chattelhood "hy the pound:' Virginia and her Southern sisters 
had elevated them to what Wilson esteemed "manhood." Xot by 
" Wilson, nor by them for whom he spoke, had the blind received 
sight. '"Property in man," you say. Well, at least it was property 
impressed with a trust; a trust which the vendor would not perform, 
but which the vendee did perform so admirably as to raise "chattel- 
hood" to manhood. The social problem is to make authority that of 
real highest over real lowest. To this the name of slavery may be 
given. The reality of slavery is government of the highest by the 
lowest. This was forced upon the South in the name of liberty. 
Of all the crimes committed in that name none surpass this. It 
said to the slave: "Be free"; to the free: "Be slave." ^Hie philan- 
thropy which emancipates to corrupt imposes a far more deadly 
yoke than the one it assumes to break. The dogma that all men are 
born, or are by nature, "free and independent," may call for some 
revision ;. seeing that man is born, or is by nature, the most depen- 
dent of all the animals on earth ; and rises to some intuition of free- 
dom, if at all, only through the stern tuition of necessity. 

In the quiver of doom there remained undrawn one arrow which 
none doubted would go straight to the mark. On the 29th of Sep- 
tember, 1865, Oliver P. Morton said at Eichmond, Indiana: "Can 
you conceive that a body of men, white or black, who, as well as 
their ancestors have been in this condition (i. e., slavery) are quali- 
fied to be lifted immediately from their present stat« into the fuU 
exercise of political power? * * * To say that such men, just 
emerging from this slavery, are qualified for the exercise of political 



44 

powers, is to make tlie strongest pro-slavery argument I ever heai'd. 
It is to pay the liighest compliment to the institution of slavery. 
* * * We not only exclude them from voting, we 
exclude them from our public schools," (what a pulpit from 
which to anathematize the South for not providing the negro 
with academies!) "and make it unlawful and criminal for them to 
come into the State. No negro who has come into Indiana since 
1850 can make a valid contract. He cannot acquire title to a piece 
of land, because the law makes the deed void; and every man who 
gives him employment is liable to prosecution and fine. * * * 
With what face can Indiana go to Congress and insist upon giving 
the right of suffrage to negroes in the South?" With what face! 
0, Heavens, with what ])reternatural face ! The face was equal to 
the fate, with the face of Morton in the lead. "The highest com- 
pliment, to the institution of slavery" was offered; "the strongest 
pro-slavery argument ever heard" by Morton, was made by Mor- 
ton. * * * "If jQy^ ^Q this," he continued, "these States will 
remain permanently colored States. The white men who are now 
there will move away. They will not remain under such a domin- 
ion. In such case the colored States will be a balance of power in 
this country. * * * Finally, they will bring about a war of 
races." 

What has been the upshot of free government in Haiti ? A cut- 
lass in the hand of a babe. Within the past few years Mr. Charles 
Francis Adams has made known what was for himself "a reflex 
light from Africa."' In tlie negro's native continent, he says, "the 
scales fell from my eyes." Filipino students take first prizes at 
our law schools, but for the present, with due precaution for 
human rights, "benevolent assimilation" can see no way to be- 
stow the boon of self-government upon them. What, then, was 
the bestowal of the boon on the black race of the South? Was 
that malevolent assimilation? One may not immodestly suggest 
there is a difference between crossing the ocean to govern dusky 
Orientals without their consent, and declining to be governed with- 
out our consent by black men at home. To the South was said : 
"It shall be your glory to make a pathway over the impassable." 
1'his which, in time of peace, the "free States" of the North with 
such contumelious scorn had rejected for themselves — this, the 
Sotitli, when worn by "attrition to the bone," like Prussia after tlie 



45 

battle of Jena, "a, bleeding and lacerated mass," was blithely called 
on to perform.* 

How are we to explain votes for this enfranchisement on the part 
of States which, so long as their own interests only were involved so 
unreservedly had voted otherwise ? It was a change sudden as that 
which, on the road to Damascus, changed Saul into Paul. The 
fabulist Aesop — whose sententious wisdom outweighs whole "vol- 
umes vast," called history, just because the so-called fable condenses 
into single instances the experience of all, so as to be co-operant 
with all — tells of two men, let us call tliem A and B, to whom 
Jupiter agreed to grant whatever wish they might prefer, on the 
following terms: A was to have first wish, and whatever A received 
was to be doubled to B. A promptly wished for the loss of one eye. 
"Are our slaves," wrote Jeiferson to John Adams, "to be presented 
with freedom and a dagger?" The so-called freedom had been be- 
stowed and the dagger had not been drawn. 

D. H. Chamberlain, once Eeconstruction governor of South Caro- 
lina, could speak with authority. "Under all the avowed motives 
for this policy," he wrote (in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1901), 
"lay a deeper cause than all others, the will and determination to 
secure party ascendancy and control at the South and in the nation 
by the negro vote. * * * Eyes were never blinder to facts ; minds 
never more ruthlessly set upon a policy, than were Stevens and 
Morton on putting the white South under the heel of the black 
South. * * * rp^ ^j^-g |.^^g ^£ folly and worse. Presi- 
dent Grant persistently yielded. * * * Those who sat in the 
seats, nominally of justice, made traffic of their judicial powers. 
* * * No branch of the public service escaped the pollution." 
"No property in man!" No; but justice is the stuff laid on the 
bargain counter; justice is bought and sold; the soul of the State 
made vendible and venal. The president who made Underwood a 
Federal judge did not carry love of justice to a fanatical extreme. 
In more sapient fanaticisms the broad way and the open gate of poli- 
tics was signified. Is not justice a human right? It is the one in- 
alienable right of man. The great abolition was the abolition of 
justice. To put "the white South under the heel of the black 

*When Sumner gave as his programme, "Universal suffrage and univer- 
sal amnesty," a not forced translation would have been, "Let us give 
amnesty in name to the white men of the South, the reality whereof will 
be their subjection to the black men of the South." 



46 

South!" Nothing devised by Weiler in his worst estate; nor by 
Alva ; nor by Attila, promised such hideous doom, as the calculated 
cruelty of the design to make the black man in the South the white 
man's master. 
"Have we," inquired Gen. Frank Blair in the Senate of the United 
States on February 5, 1871. "a federal union of free States?" "We 
have not," he answered. "The senator (Morton) has gone some- 
what into the history of the fifteenth amendment, the rightful adop- 
tion of which is controverted by his State in the concurrent resolu- 
ions passed by the legislature of Indiana." * * * jjj Kansas, 
in the election preceding, negro suffrage had been defeated by fifteen 
thousand majority. In the State of Ohio the majority against negro 
suffrage was fifty thousand. * * * j^ ^j^g State of Michigan 
the people refused to give suffrage to the negroes by a majority of 
thirty-four thousand. * * * rpj^^ senator from Indiana well 
says 'it is a political necessity to his party at this crisis.' Again 
on February 20th he asked, "What sort of power have they built 
up in the South by purifying the ballot down there?" "You 
have put in power tliroughout that Southern country a class of men 
who have made plunder their business and sole pursuit. Your re- 
constructed State governments are organized conspiracies against 
the lives, liberties and property of the people." So spoke tliis 
Union soldier, who, in Missouri, was outspoken in opposition to 
slavery at a time when Lincoln deemed it impolitic to be ex- 
plicit in Illinois. "An indestructible Union composed of in- 
destructible States!" But how can States which a President 
and Congress can overthrow and reconstruct when and as they 
please, be "indestructible?" Might not the phrase be para- 
phrased — "an indestructible Union composed of States whose 
rights have been destroyed that the Union for the preservation of 
those rights might be perpetuated !" A consummation not unlike the 
forethought of the Irish agent, who, to build a wall of defence for 
the landlord's castle, pulled down the castle to provide stones for 
the wall. In order to secure the black man's rights the white man's 
must be taken from him. Was the negro, as Jefferson surmised, 
simply a flail in the hands of enemies of a republic to accomplish 
results which otherwise were foiled? Was slavery the flail where- 
with to beat down freedom ? Was the real problem to put freedom 
"in course of ultimate extinction?" 

"Finally," Morton had prophesied, " they will bring about a war 



47 

of races." At a much earlier day Joshua Giddings is reported 
to have said: "I look forward to the day when I shall see a ser- 
vile insurrection at the South, when the black man supplied 
with British bayonets and commanded by Bfitish officers, 
shall wage a war of extermination against the white — when the mas- 
ter shall see his dwelling in flames and his hearth polluted; and 
though I may not mock at their calamity and laugh when their fear 
Cometh, yet I shall hail it, as the dawn of a political millenium."* 
A millenium of polluted hearths ! In the dark history of hate is 
there a match for that ? 

Dark and dark of purpose was the ship which was freighted to 
rebuild the South. All the criminology which Beelzebub and his 
ardent princes could hoist aboard now weighed anchor to feast on the 
fair soul of a gallant race. Like the beasts, not so long ago, un- 
loosed on the Phoenix Line steamship St. Andrew, were the rave- 
nous now uncaged. The decks resounded. Every plank quivered. 
So came Eeconstruction. It satisfied Gladstone's definition of the 
Bourbon rule in Naples — "the negation of God, erected into a sys- 
tem." It was the essential atheism involved in the disbelief and 
disdain of a moral government of the world. It was a "higher 
law" whereby the higher duties were insulted; whereby duty was 
made the ignoblest word in the language. It was '"'moral ideas" 
without a fig leaf. As Poins said to Prince Hal, "The thieves had 
bound the honest men." It was anarchy tempered by piratical pre- 
cautions. The one adequate image of it is that shape of horror 
which has become a paragraph in eacli day's paper. It was the 
rape of the highest by the lowest. To Virginia went forth a com- 
mand, not unlike that of St. Eemigius at the baptism of Clovis: 
"Burn that thou hast adored, adore that thou hast burned." There 
was a past as well as present to be rifled. Every natural sentiment 
operated to confirm the affection of the former master for the former 
slave, who, by his unabated reverence in the hour of trial, had re- 
futed the accusations urged to justify ruin. The problem was to 
extinguish this kind feeling ; to create antipathy in place of sympa- 
thy between the races; to mass race against race; to teach the negro 
to exchange all the higher qualities of a lower race for the lowest 
t|ualities of a higher race, that the tutors might walk over the course 
to offices of profit. The architects of this ruin, in their own behalf, 



*"Cause of the War." by S. D. Carpenter, page 63. 



48 

lifted up the sacred refrain, "Forasmuch as ye have done it unto the 
least of these!" And what is it ye liave done "imto the least 
of these?" Made them part and parcel of the most predaceons, 
predatory gang world ever saw. In the zeal to make odious 
what was called "treason," what was really brigandage was made 
honorable. "Let iis have peace" was the name; Eeconstruction the 
reality. Th.e message was : Weakness has no rights which power is 
bound to respect. It was the appeal to all that was low to put an 
end to all that was high. Eeconstruction enacted, one might say 
consecrated, "the sum of all villainies," made so by a coalition of 
all the villains. A great war had been waged — it was said — "for 
the integrity of the nation" — and this was the integrity — the in- 
tegrity of scallawags and carpet baggers ! 

What men and women, bound together by a sacrament of blood 
and sorrow, then bore, has been hidden out of sight. The majesty 
of a broken life, which yet was master of the breaking pain, drew up 
in moral squares of battle. If force abounded, faith more abounded. 
There could be no better proof of the moral sceptre of the South 
than the fact that it lias held such sway in the heart of the Southern 
woman. She has built the monument to Hector, though as yet none 
to Andromache. A force of grandeur dared to "turn the battle to 
the gate." It must have been the feeling of this which caused Mr. 
Eobert Y. Conrad to say of his stricken Commonwealth, with a son's 
emotion : "She is lovelier in her weeds and woe than in her queenliest 
days." Yes, lovelier, with that divine face of sorrows, whose halo 
comes from suffering for the sins of others — without sin. 

For them who stood beneath what seemed the blows of an al- 
mighty malice a voice out of thick darkness said, or seemed to say : 
"Flung as you are, by iron-hearted fate, into the vortex of this foul- 
ness, by beating back the baseness of the torrent which so blackly 
beats upon you, you may put on a finer strength. Every truth by 
which life is lifted stands as the met-wand of the struggle, the 
sorrow, the constancy demanded for it. You must be true to it 
before it becomes a truth for you; becomes your own. Supremacy 
which endures is fruit of struggle with agonies which wrestle agam.^L 
it. There is no alternative in this world, between the steady fight 
for higher things and the steady rot into lower. You who at Chan- 
cellorsville rolled in rout across the Eappahannock, like a scroll 
when it is rolled together, odds against you more than two to one, 
now, in this moral battle are welcomed to a victory of equal lustre. 



49 

To "the quintessence of selfishness" oppose, as your great captain 
did, the quintessence of heroism. A greater than your enemies has 
planted injustice like the sands of the sea around you that you may 
triumph over it. In your passion read the prophecy of your resur- 
rection. In the crux of trial to be unconquered by the pang is to 
conquer. This is the image of the Divine. The heavens have de- 
creed you worthy of it. Make of your humiliation a "meritorious 
cross and passion." Endure it, "despising the shame." 

Out of the injury of wounds whose marks he cherished as armo- 
rial bearings; out of wounds and prison, Payne returned to stand 
with worn strength and torn heart against more bitter battle. As 
he had fought bravely he as deeply mourned the cause which had 
gone down. The warrior scars upon him, the warrior soul within 
him, commissioned him to lead. He had returned to see the natu- 
ral enemies of government in control of government. There loomed 
before him, and others in like case with him, the figure of a wrath- 
ful Nemesis, commissioned to smite hip and thigh the tradition of 
the past, and bury it face downward. A mother State, chastened 
by the sanctity of sorrow, held out her hand. There could be but 
one course for Payne. The word tergiversation was not in his 
lexicon. Apostacy was not his long suit. With a stern repression, 
of that which admitted not of suppression; with a kind of mail- 
clad resolution; with an intrepid calm, through wliicli one almost 
saw the gauntleted hand still resting on the sword hilt, he took his 
place in the conflict, where all that was lofty was at stake. He had 
the faith of courage, the courage of faith. Faith without courage is 
dead. As a working theory, faith might bo defined as fidelity to 
the law of our being. As is the depth of this faith, so is the sense 
of responsibility to acquit ourselves to it. So is the sense of re- 
morse for dereliction from it. To maintain moral independence 
was now very nearly the whole duty of man. To influence others, 
Payne had what in his day had not ceased to be the winning forces 
of courage, courtesy and rectitude. In his own Northern Neck 
he was seen and heard, with cheering word, with manly hope, with 
conviction, with resolve. His State lay beneath tbe iieel of cor- 
ruption, more deadly than any of which George III. bad cognizance. 
Her proud sic semper, for liim as the vow of his sponsors in bap- 
tism, claimed from him never a more supreme allegiance than when 
the figures on her shield liad been I'everscd. When her misfortune 
was supreme his allegiance was supreme. Her proud iKmor had 



60 

stood the Ehrenbreitstein of heroic hope. Might not that still 
stand — the lofty, battle-scared rock — to which hope might cling, 
when all around was falling? In later years it was said of him, "he 
lives in the past, out of place in this hustling scene, as Cato's re- 
public in the dregs of Eomulus." It may be there has come upon 
the stage a generation which feels competent to look down upon all 
that is here commended. Be it so. Yet just because his own foot- 
hold was so firmly planted in that past, with the greater firmness he 
looked through the bitterness of his own time to the resurrection of 
a better time. Fight on, brave heart; out of the dust and darkness 
of the well-fought field emerge, at last, the stars of heaven. The 
book of chivalry once more lay wide open; once more the altar rose. 
In the wreck of hope he dared to hope. 

In the life of her husband, Mrs. Jefferson Davis tells us his con- 
struction of his stewardship was very strict. His office had for him 
no perquisites. When she once sent a package by his messenger he 
said to her: "Patrick's services are for the War Department; the 
horse and wagon are for government use. Employ another servant 
if your own are not adequate to your use." So once the trust for 
liberty was held. To-day we come across it as a quaint relic dug up 
from the Old Curiosity Shop of the past. It discloses a discrepancy 
between post and antebellum, which, in Carlylian phrase, is "signifi- 
cant of much." 

The hour had struck for the abasement of the like of this. In 
this forlorn extremity, Iwautiful once more was the hero's scorn of 
self; once more holding the hearts of followers by the spell of that 
beauty. As in camp the general sought to fare no better than his 
men, so it was in the ravages of peace. To Hampton, in his need, 
South Carolina offered the gift of a home. Great as was the need 
of him who had sacrificed wealth and home, the offer was declined. 
The people of Texas contributed a purse to enable Magrudc-i- to luy 
a plantation. The knightly answer came : "No, gentlemen, ^h-^n I 
espoused the cause of the South, I embraced poverty and v/illiagly 
accepted it." The trustees of Washington and Lee offered to thtir 
President a deed to the house he occupied. With appreciation it was 
declined. It was offered to his wife and again declined. To his 
son and successor, for the third time, it was offered. With 
renewed appreciation for the third time it was declined. Thi-? 
was that old South, on the final passing of which we are 
from time to time felicitated. Answer might be made, "In 



51 

that old South, power was sought for the eminence of which it was 
the witness; for the sincere 'honor, love, obedience' which followed; 
and no longer follows. When power is sought because it puts money 
in the purse, it ceases to be a spiritual power. It becomes that for 
which it is t-ought, pursued, possessed — material power. That old 
South left record proof (nobler than proof of mail), that greatness 
is in the world not to get for nothing, but to give for nothing ; that 
the sign manual of heroic love — the seal wherewith it is sealed — Js 
sacrifice. Because of this spiritual source of power that old South 
knew how to follow truth and suffer for it. Because thereof, 
though forty years and more look back upon it, our hearts invincibly 
are held.'"* 

Consistently was Lee outlawed, all for which he stood was out- 
lawed. Consistently did the beloved disciple of "moral ideas" con- 
sign Lee to "the avenging pen of history."' Between him and the 
character of Lee exists the irrepressible conflict which has been 
since the world began. History shall avenge. The God of history 
will avenge. "It is history which teaches us to hope." 

This is the meed of greatness — falling overborne by numbers— to 
fall without loss of greatness; to be glorious in ruin; nay, to be 
glorified by ruin; because the greatness is deserved, the ruin unde- 
served. Eobert Lee had shown the futility of a whole hostile world 
against that armor of proof called character. The enmities wliich 

*The Washington Star of January 26, 1907, publishes: "The Senate of 
North Carolina received to-day a letter from Mrs. 'Stonewall' Jackson 
declining to accept a pension of $100 a month, provided under a resolu- 
tion introduced a few days ago." The ground of Mrs. Jackson's action 
was that her needs were not such as to justify her in accepting what 
was proposed. It is added: "Mrs. Jackson suggests that the money pro- 
posed in her behalf be appropriated to the relief of destitute widows of 
Confederate veterans. In accordance with the desire of Mrs. Jackson, 
the bill calling for the pension was withdrawn from the calendar." 

The statement respecting Hampton should be modified. In 1899 a 
movement was started to rebuild, by public contributions, his house, 
shortly before destroyed by fire. Hearing of this, Hampton wrote: "I 
cannot accept from my friends a testimonial of regard, such as they 
propose; but the affection shown by them in wishing to reimburse me 
for my loss can never be forgotten." Mr. Edward L. Wells states: "It 
is a pleasure to say, however, that the project was carried out. * * * 
In the residence thus provided he commenced his last sleep." Hampton 
died April 11, 1901. (Hampton and Reconstruction, pp. 219-224.) This 
work had not been seen at the time the above address was delivered. 



52 

would if they could humiliate become the apparel of a finer dignity. 
A whole world's force breaks in vain against this; crouches at last 
before this. 

And now if his Commonwealth, and others in like adversity, 
approach this pattern, may they not also break misfortune by being 
unbroken ? I hold up the constancy of Payne as that of one who in 
this battle "firm did stand"; along with others also firm. Once 
more he bore him as a knight; true to the tradition of his State; 
true to it in the beginning; true to it in the middle; true to it in the 
end. The moral battle now before him, and before others 
aligned with him, was a hand-to-hand conflict with the con- 
stabulary of Satan and his posse; a fight against the rulers 
of darkness of this world. Out of chaos was to be created a 
habitable world. Law secures freedom by imposing limits upon 
license. "Higher law" tore down those limits, so as to leave free- 
dom no defense. 

Beautiful is courage in response to duty. Sincere expression in 
word or work of a man's true spirit ; his veritable essence fascinates. 
The condition of moral ])rogress is moral courage. This moral force 
was the strength and charm of Payne. One felt that the physical 
man had been cast in a mould to match the intellectual and moral. 
None saw in him the false note of them whose thoughts are traitors 
to their tongues. In the grapple with evil at the bottom of the pit ; 
in the duel in the dark between sincerity and semblance, calling 
every instant for that patience under strain which gives strengtli to 
the weakest, depth to the shallowest, his own profound conviction 
was his eloquent persuasion. All could see the purpose to put be- 
fore other minds what was deepest in his own. The issue was — 
which is strongest, the contagion of baseness or the contagion of 
heroism? Beneath a quiet manner was felt his alert energy. The 
energy of worthy passions was his pathos. A force of heart and 
intellect spoke with a simplicity of sympathy and force which 
grasped hearts and intellects; spoke without dissimulation. Fealty 
to the highest that was in him was his faith. His enemies were the 
enemies of Virginia; his friends all who fought for her, wrought for 
her, suffered for her. The great heart of her past was for him a 
sacred heart, l)eating in him as his own. He had the reverence of 
the antique world for the lofty in deed and thought, the true in 
heart, the firm in will. This, indeed, was ingrained in him ; part 
of the essential refinement of his nature; a spirit envelo])ing liim 



53 

like a fine ether. For what so refines as reverence; what so re- 
fined? He was true soldier of the cause which pierced with wounds 
for us is pure and crowned with thorns for us is holy. His silver 
spurs, the gift of fair women to brave manhood, were torn from him 
as he lay insensible on the field of Williamsburg. Of the knight- 
hood they were intended to adorn he could not be despoiled. There 
might be applied to him words spoken of an English statesman by 
Argyle — "Firm as the rock, and clear as the crystal that adorns the 
rock." 

He was no demagogue, nor did he bow to that material wealth, 
which is the mimic counterfeit of greatness. He had not '"flattered 
its rank breath." Yet had he so willed, the highest honors in his 
Commonwealth were within his grasp. General Fitz Lee and 
Major John W. Daniel bore testimony to this. To a friend he 
wrote: "My aversion to public life is genuine, and, I confess I exult 
in the freedom of speaking, thinking and acting without one en- 
slaved thought." In this subordination of self to the cause more 
dear than self, he makes us feel anew the force and charm of those 
grand old types which flash on us from the age of chivalry. I^ot 
for office, not for renown, still less for his own pocket, but for her- 
self, he loved and served Virginia. By the side of this all the 
trumpets of renown were as naught. The dearness of a cause which 
defeat could not dethrone, he characteristically uttered in a letter 
advocating the election of General Hunton to the senate: "You 
know," he wrote, "he was picked up at Gettysburg, at what the 
Yankees call the 'high water mark,' and brought away from the 
field in a bloody blanket. I cannot get over these things myself. 
I would not make them a substitute for industry, energy, integrity 
and capacity; but where industry, energy, integrity and capacity 
exist, in my opinion, a good Confederate record glorifies the whole." 

It is hard to be popular and pure ; yet Payne was popular and he 
was pure. The fact survives for me as a memory and a monument ; 
as a credible witness that the world, even the sordid, venal, rocking 
world of this time and land, still falls at the feet of him who will 
not swerve from calling and conviction, for a world. Xo man had 
warmer friends; no man was more deserving of them. Ingrained 
thoughtfulness of others, the natural courtesy of high breeding, was 
stamped upon liim. He lived among us like an echo of the olden 
time. How true he was, how he tied to his heart the cause for 
which he foui^ht, disdaining to desert the rent banner of his faith: 



54 

holding aloft to the last the glorified symbol of his heart's devotion, 
that dying he might fall upon it, and be buried in it. 

With the withdrawal of that "consent of the governed" which 
bayonets procure, carpet bag government fell; as if consumed to 
ashes in the blaze of an Almighty scorn. The faliric of fraud and 
falsehood crumbled at a touch. The rubbish lies behind us; image 
of the fate of false appearance before firm reality. Constitutions 
of freedom worthy the name spring from hearts that will break 
rather than forsake them. They who mistake the hue and cry of 
the moment for tlie voice of the ages, find it easy to put fanatical 
hyperbole into statutes; not so easy to obtain obedience thereto or 
respect tlierefor. Fiction will not do the work of fact. 

Ernest Crosby, in his life of Garrison, writes: "The slaves were 
finally freed, as a war measure to assist the armies in the field. The 
war was not designed to heli) emancipation, but emancipation to help 
the war. * * * rpj^^ practical element in the union spirit was 
the desire to preserve the size of the country: it was devotion to the 
idea of bigness, and the belief that bigness is a matter of latitude 
and longitude. * * * ]\Ioney was needed to ])ay the enormous 
expenses of destruction and the tariff began to grow, and behind it 
monopoly ensconced itself. * * * ^^Ye stabbed the South to the 
quick, and during all the years of Reconstruction turned the dagger 
round in the festering wound." 

"By their fruits ye shall know them.'' Where are the higher 
moral aims to which a crusade of "moral ideas" and "higher law" 
should summon? Territorial magnitude has supplanted compact 
as basis of union. The prevailing passion is that the committee on 
insurance of the American Bar Association has called "the riotous 
desire of bigness." A gigantic egotism ; a supreme power cemented 
by bribes to the phalanx on which that power depends; a Federal 
force which was ordained for the protection of the citizen from 
power, perverted to one which exists for the ])Iunder of the citizen 
by power ; all the unclean progeny brouglit to tlie birtli by the malign 
mother of predatory trusts; a civil liberty which is the crowned 
courtesan of all the appetites — are our present help in time of 
trouble. Not without reason Cardinal Gibbons has been moved (if 
correctly reported) to lament wliat he termed "tlie putridity of pri- 
vate character." 

So it comes to pass we have them, who from the official pinnacle 
are branded as "the criminal rich." Anarchy answereth to anarchy, 



55 



lawlessness at the bottom to lawlessness at the top. Benjamm Har- 
son was entitled to know whereof he spoke, when on the 22d of Feb- 
rnary, 1898, referring to the speech : "A house divided against itself 
cannot stay half slave and half free," he gave as ^esent l-raphrase : 
"This country cannot stay half taxed and half tree." Ihis s he 
reality. This creates the Asiastic system, whcreunder ultimately the 
taxpayer shall have no rights which the tax consumer will be bound 
to respect It is the old eternal conflict between government as a 
trust ind government as a spoil. Magnitude has taljen root as niag- 
nanimity. As conclusion of the whole matter, the Washington P^ 
of August 14, 1906, has this to say : "Let us be trank about ,t. Hie 
day the people of the North responded to Abraham Lmcoln^s call lor 
troops to coerce sovereign States, the republic died, and the nation 

was born." ^^ . , „ . ^, , 

Does a great movement for righteousness "wm out m uii. 
fashion? Were moral ideas the expression of moral insinceri- 
ties^ Is it thus the "new birth of freedom" is justified ot ner 
children; thus the thunderbolt purifies the sky? The author, 
of Reconstruction have called down on themselves the beasts 
they turned loose to rend others. Retribution like those l^)i-e- 
told by Hebrew prophets have followed with the force ot fate. 
The tireless force of a universe takes a terrible revenge on them who 
pollute the altars of the highest with the selfishness of the lowest. 
In the issue, dark and deep, increasingly darkening and deepenmg, 
between the toiling and spoiling classes, we already hear the rumble, 
as of distant thunder; or it may be of volcanic insurgence against a 
rule which presents the a.ntithesis of wealtli to Commonwealth 
There are signs of dissatisfaction with spoliation as a means of 
grace; a dumb consciousness of feeling, rather than perception, t.a 
prosperity of plunder is adversity of plundered. Ihe centie 
of gravity has been shifted from moral to materia^ power. 
As climax to a war for human rights, the one ina lienab e right 
which seems secure is the right of Lazarus to be taxed tor the taWe 
of Dives What means this antithesis ; tliis accumulation pari pa.sn 
o material wealth and moral poverty; this material almightmess 
Lat^d on the throne? It means that the South as ^^l~^^^ 
force of the Union was struck down by Reconstruction. It mean. 
that war for the Union, and Reconstruction in pursuance thereof 
to e up by the roots the civilization of the South, and hud tJie axe to 



56 

every best element in that of the North. It means that carpet bag 
government has come home to roost. 

For the veneration of reality we have the idolatry of appearance; 
"the powers that be" dethroned by the powers that seem. A moral 
system that has abolished reverence cannot be expected to receive it. 
Eeverence has been lost in the rattle of machinery. A greatness, 
strenuous for self (where the strenuous is so ready to slide into the 
sinuous), looks out upon the hollow worship of a greatness as hollow. 
The stream of Reconstruction has not risen higher than the source. 
Self-aggrandizement and self-ostentation care little for others; are 
little cared for by others. If, as from time to time suggested, what 
is visible is only a bubble on the surface of a deeper putrefaction, we 
have simply the old, old story of a material progress whose price is 
moral decay. This swirling vortex of delirious cupidities, this wel- 
ter of the sensual beatitudes, after all, is but a shining robe of rotten- 
ness, which differs in size chiefly from John Randolph's "rotten 
herring in the moonlight, which shines and stinks and stinks and 
shines." The old question confronts you. Will you cling to your 
own birthright; or in the exigency of material desires swap for the 
mess of pottage. Be sons of your own sires ; and in the future the 
cause for which your purest spirits yielded up the ghost will be 
numbered with the grand "Lost Causes," which conquer by cruci- 
fixion. Join your ardours to the opposite ; and though you lay field 
to field, island to island, isthmus to archipelago, the history of the 
future, whenever the historian fearless and free shall come, will be 
constrained to write: "jSTever was there a people which so purely 
worshipped bigness or was so wholly innocent of greatness." 0, my 
fellow Virginians, for long absent from you, I am one of you ; spurn 
from you these ideals ; leave to the idolators their idols. To wallow 
in their worship is to break the sword of Lee. 

When the stress of Reconstruction had subsided, Payne gave his 
mind to law with a fair share of the concentration which had per- 
vaded him in war. In the forum, as in the field, he maintained his 
cause frankly, firmly, fearlessly. As still later, he retired from 
general practice, it was his delight to draw around him, in the circle 
of his home, his old companions in arms. His friends admired in 
him the sincerities of a strong, the sympathies of an ardent, nature; 
tiie poise of a masculine good sense ; the ingrained frankness, the 
subtle graces of intuitive high breeding. Had his table talk been 
takeo down, freshly as it was conceived, it would have borne com- 



57 

parison with more famous dialogue. It possessed that great charm 
of life and manners — sincerity and simplicity. His discussion of a 
subject enchained attention by the spontaneity of the thought and 
the chastity of speech v/hich clothed it — this lightened with a genial 
humor, at times a quiet wit, which could be both searching and 
severe. He was at ease with those around him because of his self- 
respect, and courteous because of his respect for others. He had to 
the last the strict habits of a man of business. Punctual to his ap- 
pointments, exact in his accounting, he knew as well how to take 
care of himself as to defend others. To the last his counsel wag 
sought, valued, followed. A gentleman's inexorable instinct never 
failed him on any field of daring or of grace. Take him, all in all, 
he was a fine type of that fine old Virginia gentleman, who rose up 
in a grand, unappeasable wrath, on the day that Lincoln called for 
troops to conquer Commonwealths. 

So life wore to a close, until at last to the sadness of many, on the 
29th day of March, 1904, the spark flew upward. Standing not far 
from him when he breathed his last, I felt that I saw expire one who 
was, if not the last, then among the last of the knights. It was the 
close of a life founded on conviction. As he was sinking he was 
heard to mutter, "Fitz," as if calling to him by whose side he so 
often rode, to mount the pale steed with him, and once more at full 
gallop charge the enemy of all. The last trumpet had roused him 
to meet the last enemy in the spirit in which he met the first; with 
the same true friend, the same trusty sword by his side. And aii ! 
so soon the one to whom he called did follow. Do two, who lived 
in sight of the same pattern, still strive together, like racers, for 
their goal ? Was that, which so soon followed, the response ? Have 
the old comrades clasped hands once more ? 

" In what etherial dances 
By what eternal streams?" 

Never will I forget the beautiful lament which thrilled the air as 
his body was borne into the little church at Warrenton. A tender 
pathos quivered on the lips, as of some vox humana which had wan- 
dered from the skies and to the skies returned. From no doomed 
cathedral ever floated purer sorrow than from this choir nestled in 
the hills. A noble life's music, the music of his own life, rose with 
it and breathed from it. It was a requiem which swept with tears 
the eves of warlike men. His Black Horse Troop — all that was left 



58 

of them — followed him for the last time to his last rest. The flags 
of Virginia and the Confederacy, and his old gray coat, were wrapt 
about his bier like the Highland Plaids around Dundee. Over his 
open grave there bowed the genuine lament which a life of integrity 
and intrepidity commands. It was one more witness to the unfad- 
ing lustre of the Spartan borne upon his shield. The Valhalla of 
the warlike is his home. The company of all true knights shall call 
him comrade. Each brave, each courteous, spirit will be there. If 
the pure in heart shall see God, he is face to face with his Maker. 

It is, then, my privilege to be your medium to accept the portrait 
of this officer and gentleman, this jurist, this Virginian. It has 
been painted for you by an artist of his own beloved Warrenton, 
one who knew and loved him; whose aim, in this, as in all other 
work, has been to paint the truth. It has been presented to you by 
the companion of his courage and his heart. I accept it as the por- 
trait of one who, in the words placed upon his tomb, was, in war 
and in peace, the soldier of Virginia's honor. I accept it as the 
portrait of one worthy to shine in the firmament of your renown. 
He is entitled to share the fame who was ever more than ready to 
share the fate of the bravest in the brunt. 



59 



Appendix. 



NOTE A. 

The following letter, as annotated by General Payne (and found 
by his executor among his papers), is appended, as significant of 
the knightly self-effacement emphasized in the foregoing address. 
General Payne had been wounded and captured at Hanover, Penn- 
sylvania. Years afterwards, the gallant Union soldier who made 
him prisoner seeing in the papers the death of Captain A. D. Payne, 
the heroic successor of his cousin in the command of the Black 
Horse Troop, supposed him to be the officer captured at Hanover, 
and wrote to his widow a letter which deeply touched her. Her 
daughter sent this (or a copy) to General Payne, to show, as she 
said, 'Tiow my dear father's noble, generous nature impressed all 
with whom he was thrown." General Payne clearly saw the mis- 
take; but also saw the balm it was to bleeding hearts. He, there- 
fore made no correction. That correction has been made for the 
first time in the past few days, in the confidence (promptly veri- 
fied), that the family of Captain A. D. Payne would accept, m 
requittal, the sacred satisfaction of a tribute so true and tender, by 
the man to whom the husband and father was best and longest 
known; as sweet a tribute as could be rendered by one brave man to 
another. With full consent the publication is now made. 

Chicago, III., March 24, 1893. 
Mbs. Alexander Dixon Payne, 

Dear Madam,— It is with deep sorrow that I learn of the death of 
your noble and justly distinguished husband, Captain Payne. I had tne 
strange pleasure of making his acquaintance at the battle of Hanover 
Junction Penn., in 1863. A number of my men had surrounded him and 
were firing at him, evidently intending to kill him. I rode up just in 
time to save his life. I took him in charge, and on my horse behind 
me rode off with him. There was something in his brave and chival- 
rous demeanor that greatly impressed me. 

1 never saw him but once afterwards. I have often thought of him, 
but heard nothing until this morning when I read the announcement 
of his death in one of our morning papers. Permit me, although an 
entire stranger to you, to extend my tenderest sympathy in this the 
hour of your irreparable loss. 



60 

Your husband was a manly man, brave as a lion, courtly as a prince, 
true as steel to his convictions, and a man whom even those who dif- 
fered with him could not help respecting and admiring. 

In his case, in a pre-eminent sense, the words of Tennyson have a 
profound significance, 

'T'were better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 

Most respectfully, 

Philip Krohn, 

Late First Lieutenant Company G, Fifth New York Cavalry. 

356 Belden Avenue, Chicago. 

April 17th, 1893. — Alice enclosed original of the above letter to me 
as evidence of the admiration her father inspired in his enemies. 
Winter had seen it and identified it as a mistake for me and so told 
Eppa, with a request not to undeceive them. Alice did not recognize 
it as anything she had heard from her father, and, I think, sent it to 
me to confirm or correct it. I could not strip the child of the evident 
pride she felt and let it stand. It would have been truer of dear Aleck 
than of me if he had had the same chance. 

(Endorsement on back of letter.) 

Copy of 
Letter to Nannie Payne written under a mistake. 

I am the person referred to. I was wounded and captured at 
Hanover, Pa., on the day named and under the circumstances (fairly 
accurately stated). I fell into the hands of a very fine fellow. Alec, 
was not captured nor was his command engaged. 

I did not, however, undeceive Nannie. Alec, was capable of doing 
all that is imputed. 

NOTE B. 

For them (if such there be) who fail to comprehend why Lee 

holds captive the heart and imagination, not for one time only, but 

for all time, assistance may be found in the treasured reminiscence 

of Mr. Edwin Sublett : 

St. Louis, February 21, 1898. 

A Southern poet has described General Robert E. Lee at the battle of 
the Wilderness, detailing the famous incident when he placed himself 
at the head of the Texas brigade to lead it in its victorious charge. 
Struck with his courage, his perfect self-command and soldierly bear- 
ing in that crisis of the fight, the poet says: 

" Not a whit moved was he, 
Calm and resolute, Robert Lee." 



61 

There was another battle in which I participated as a private soldier, 
in which his coolness and his heroic and generous nature were evinced 
in quite as striking, and possibly in even a more admirable manner. 

On the afternoon of May 10, 1864, our battery, the Third Company of 
Richmond Howitzers, Hardaway's Battalion (Old First Virginia Artil- 
lery) was holding its position in the toe of the "Horse Shoe" near 
Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia. We were about the centre of the 
Confederate lines. Our infantry support, at one heel of the "Horse 
Shoe," gave way under a heavy charge, ordered by General Grant for 
the purpose of piercing our lines and separating the right and left 
wings of Lee's army. This seemed for a time to have succeeded, and 
undoubtedly would have been successful and might have resulted in 
the complete defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia, but for General 
Lee's prompt and decisive action in bringing up additional commands 
of his veteran infantry, throwing them into the breach in our lines and 
driving the enemy back. At the time of the Federal assault General 
Lee was standing not over five hundred yards away. He sent his staff 
in every direction to bring up the available troops and drive back the 
force which had temporarily captured our centre. 

It was during the interval in which the Federals held possession of 
the "Horse Shoe" that the incident which showed General Lee most 
superbly to me occurred. If there was any occasion when a com- 
mander might have shown agitation, anxiety, and trepidation, surely 
this was the time. Not only was he exposed to great personal danger. 
Taut the defeat of his army was imminent. It looked as if all his skill 
and all the courage displayed by his men during the long war were 
now about to be suddenly made entirely unavailing. Every one knows 
that there was no more decisive period in that bloody campaign of the 
summer of '64 than the fight over the "Horse Shoe" The guns of our 
battery had been captured, and those who escaped death, and who 
had not been compelled to surrender, did so by jumping over our works 
on the side directly facing the main body of the enemy and running 
down the ditch on the opposite heel of the "Horse Shoe" that was still 
held by our men. 

Just before dark I reached a small farm-house which was General 
Lee's headquarters. I there joined General John B. Gordon's command, 
which was rushing into action to recapture our works, and as I ran 
through the yard of this farm-house a badly wounded man called to 
me and said: "For God's sake give me some water." He was a very 
large man and I at the time still a boy. I went to his assistance, and 
while kneeling on my left knee with his hands locked over my neck, 
that I might raise him up so that he could drink from my canteen, I 
"heard a voice which was manly and calm, but extremely gentle and 
kind, say: "My young friend, this is a very exposed position for your 
wounded comrade, I would advise you to place him behind the base 
of the stone chimney," and then seeing the extreme difference in our 
sizes, he continued: "I will assist you." I looked around and saw it 
was General Robert E. Lee. He placed his hands under the soldier's 



62 

elbows and supported him to the place of temporary shelter in the 
protection of the chimney. There the wounded man stayed until the 
stretcher corps rescued him. General Lee then retraced his steps to 
where he had directed his aides to return to him in that enclosure of 
death. I then rejoined Gordon's command. 

A few hours more, and after terrible fighting, General Lee's lines 
had been recaptured by his men, and our guns, which the enemy had 
been unable to remove, were restored to our possession and we re- 
opened on the fleeing Federals. 

Whenever I think of General Lee I think of him as he appeared be- 
fore me then, such a superb illustration of physical manhood, such a 
handsome, noble countenance, so erect, so soldierly in his bearing, 
meeting the emergencies which confronted him with such military 
genius, and masterful skill, and being able and ready at such a moment 
to bestow tender, thoughtful aid on a wounded private soldier. 

No man could have been what he was without great natural gifts, 
but no man even with those gifts who had not exercised marvelous self- 
discipline, who had not constantly been under the control of resolute 
duty, and the determination to make the most of himself, could havje 
been what he w-as. He never smoked, he never drank, he never in- 
dulged in any excesses. To great natural abilities had been added train- 
ing, study and discipline, and his faculties were unimpaired by indul- 
gence in a single vice. To crown all this was his genuine, unosten- 
tatious, unpharisaical Christian piety, entirely free from cant and in- 
tolerance. With such qualities in defeat as in victory he was sure 

to be" great. 

(Signed) Edwin Huger Sublett, 

Late Third Company, Richmond Howitzers, Hardaway's Battalion, 

Army Northern Virginia. 

Residence, 4152 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Mo. 
March 25, 1899. — As interlined above this is a correct copy of the 
original. Edwin Hugek Sublett. 

NOTE C. 

From the fountain height of self-devotion, there did flow a 
stream filling the soul with the high thought of heroes, whose 
dwelling was in the liglit from that high source; a sacred stream 
flowing, as it were, from "a fountain filled with blood." A memo- 
rial of this high thought, preserved for one State, is a speech for all 
which partake of the tradition. It may he read in the inscription 
engraved on the Confederate Monument in Charleston, South Caro- 
lina, and prepared by William Henry Trescott. 

THIS MONUMENT 

perpetuates the memory 

Of those who. 

True to the instincts of their birth, 



68 

Faithful to the teachings of their fathers. 

Constant in their love for the State, 

Died in the performance 

Of what they believed their duty; 

Who 

Have glorified a fallen cause 

By the simple manhood of their lives, 

The patient endurance of suffering, 

And the heroism of death; 

And who, 

In the dark hours of imprisonment, 

In the hopelessness of the hospital, 

In the short, sharp agony of the field. 

Found 

Their support and consolation 

In the belief 

That at home they would not be forgotten. 

Those for whom they died 

Inscribe on this marble 

The solemn record of their sacrifice, 

The perpetual gratitude of the State they served. 

The undying affection of those 

Whose lives 

The separation of death 

Has shadowed with an everlasting sorrow. 

Scattered over the battle fields of the South, 

Buried in remote and alien graves. 

Dying unsoothed by the touch 

Of familiar and household hands, 

Their names are graven here 

To recall 

To their children and kinsmen. 

How worthily they lived, 

How nobly they died, 

And in what tender reverence 

Their memory survives. 

Let the stranger, 

Who may in future times 

Read this inscription, 

Recognize that these were men 

Whom power could not corrupt. 

Whom death could not terrify. 

Whom defeat could not dishonor; 

And let their virtues plead for just judgment 

Of the cause in which they perished. 

Let the South Carolinian 

Of another generation 

Who may read this list of honored names 



64 



Remember 

That the State taught them 

How to live and how to die; 

And that from her broken fortunes 

She has left to her children 

The one priceless legacy of their memories, 

Teaching all who may 

Claim the birthright 

That 

Truth, Courage and Patriotism 

Endure forever. 






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